How to Structure your Asset Categories?

How to Structure your Asset Categories?

A Budget is not a Quote

One of Propel Your MSP's goals is to create a precise budget for the next 3 or 5 years. But a budget is not a detailed quote, nor should it be. It's a tool to help MSPs have a productive discussion with their client about the future. When mapping the PSA assets types to Propel's Asset Categories, you may find that it may be useful to split an asset type into two (sub-)categories (or maybe merge two into a single one). The key question to ask is "are those assets handled in a substantially different way in terms of lifespan, warranty coverage and/or replacement cost?".

Different Cost Structure = Different Asset Category

When deciding which Asset Categories you need, you will want to think about how each Asset type should be handled in terms of replacement (cost), warranty renewals and OS upgrades. Each time the costs are significantly different (and affecting many assets), it may be useful to create a separate asset category.

For example, your RMM may put all workstations for a particular client into a "Workstation" type in your PSA, but the reality is that this client has "Developer Workstations" that cost twice as much as other, regular "Workstations". Splitting those "Workstations" assets into two Asset Categories, one with a replacement price of, say, $1200 and the other at $3500 will produce a better budget.

But, if you have different kind of laptops, the only difference being that one is $1000 and the other is $1100, you should probably keep them grouped together into a single category priced at $1050. That should be precise enough for the budgeting discussions with your client. When the replacement date arrives, you will want to issue a real official quote.

Supporting Different Pricing

If you often have different pricing scenarios like the one described above, it may be helpful to create the "variations" of an asset category as Account Master Asset Category templates. That will make reorganizing company assets faster.

You can simply move the related assets to a newly created company asset category that is based on that Account template.

1- First select the asset that need to be handled differently:


2- Create a new Company Asset Category based on the Account Template.

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