Hardware Assets (HAM)

The Hardware Assets template installs a database for hardware asset management (HAM). A HAM database is used to track every laptop, monitor, and phone your team owns, from purchase order through assignment and into disposal. It’s built to answer questions like “Who has this device?”, “What’s still in stock?”, “Whose warranty is about to lapse?”, and “Where did the retired laptops go?” Install it from the template library, or ask Catalyst to “set up a hardware assets database.” One team gets one Hardware Assets database.

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What it models

The Hardware Asset table holds one record per physical device, keyed by asset tag. Its fields are grouped into the following sections:

• Assignment: who holds the device and where it lives, plus lifecycle state (On order → In stock → In transit → In use → In maintenance → Retired, or Missing).
• Device Health: enrollment and posture pulled from your MDM (enrolled, last check-in, OS version, whether disk encryption is on).
• Procurement: purchase order, cost, and the vendor it came from.
• Lifecycle: warranty and support dates, and a standalone legal hold flag.

Supporting tables map those devices to a catalog, supply chain, and paper trail. Every table is scoped to the requester for the help desk agent, so questions like “where’s my laptop?” resolve to the devices that the requester holds. The supporting tables are:

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Use cases

• Assignment and “where’s my laptop?” The help desk agent answers device questions from the requester’s own records, like what they hold, its warranty, and its health.
• Stock and provisioning. Track what’s in each stockroom and move it with Stock Transfers, so new employee provisioning and replacements draw from known inventory.
• Warranty and renewal exposure. Quickly find devices whose warranty or support contract is about to lapse.
• Audit and chain of custody. Reconcile the register against what’s physically present with scanning, and close the loop at end of life with a Disposal Order that records data-wipe verification.

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Usage tips

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Enrich from your MDM

The Device Health section is designed to be filled by ingestion from your mobile device management source (Jamf, Iru, or Intune), so enrollment status, last check-in, OS version, and encryption state stay current automatically. Serial number is the match key that joins an MDM device to its Hardware Asset. Financial fields can also come from procurement in the same pass, with a source-of-truth priority per field.

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Use validation rules

You can add validation rules that are checked when a record is created, updated, or unarchived. Rules apply going forward and don’t retroactively scan existing records. For example, you can add rules that require an assignee before a device can move to In use, or a wipe certificate before a Disposal Order closes.

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Visualize the fleet with a dashboard

The template pairs with a pre-built analytics dashboard so you can get an overview of the fleet without building views by hand.

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Audit hardware with scanning

Scanning turns a Hardware Assets database into a physical inventory process. It’s available on every database once the Databases capability is enabled for your team (Settings → Capabilities → Databases); there’s no separate scanning toggle. On a Hardware Assets database, open the Scans control in the header to start a scan or manage audit plans.

• Any unique field can be a barcode. Whatever uniquely identifies the device (e.g. Asset tag, serial number) is what a scan matches against.
• Create an audit plan. A plan defines the set of devices expected in a location or batch. As you scan, each item lands in one of four buckets: found (expected and present), missing (expected, not seen), unexpectedly present (seen, not expected), or no match (scanned a code that maps to nothing). You can map Catalyst workflows or field updates to each outcome. For example, when a device comes back as “missing”, run a workflow that opens a recovery ticket for its assigned holder.
• Scan from a desktop wedge or a paired phone. Use a USB barcode scanner at a workstation, or pair a phone by QR code to scan with its camera. Single or batch, every scan is attributed to the person signed in.

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How it fits with the other templates

Hardware Assets tracks the physical device and its money trail. The CMDB tracks the same machines as infrastructure (a Server, keyed on FQDN) for service-impact analysis, and Software & Licensing tracks what’s installed on them. The three are separate databases joined by shared serial numbers and Locations, not hard references. Linking a Hardware Asset to its CMDB Server isn’t modeled by the template. Instead, you add it with your own relationship if you want the two sides tied together explicitly.