Three fields people constantly conflate
- Status — available, in use, checked out, in maintenance, in repair, damaged, lost, retired.
- Condition — the physical shape of the unit, independent of whether it is free.
- Custody — the person, crew, vehicle or site currently holding it.
Why condition and status must stay separate
A generator can be available and in poor condition. A machine can be in excellent condition and unavailable because it is on a three-week job. Collapsing the two into one field forces a false choice and means the dispatcher cannot see the difference between 'nobody has it' and 'nobody should want it'.
It also matters for planning. Condition trends across a fleet are what tell you a replacement is due before the failure happens on a customer's property.
Custody is about accountability, not surveillance
The point is not to watch people. It is to make sure that when something is missing, there is a last known holder and a date, so the conversation is specific and short. Vague loss is corrosive — it produces suspicion of everybody and consequences for nobody.
A custody record is also how a new crew member finds the impact wrench at 7 a.m. without waking a foreman. Most of its value is retrieval, not enforcement.
Assignment to jobs versus assignment to people
Assigning equipment to a job answers 'what does this work need on site'. Assigning it to a person or vehicle answers 'who is responsible for it right now'. Both are useful and they are not interchangeable — a machine can be allocated to a job while physically sitting in a specific van.
The practical rule: allocate to the job for planning, record custody for accountability, and never let one imply the other.
Service history outlives the job
Maintenance, repairs and service dates belong to the asset. A repair logged against the job that happened to be running that week disappears the moment the job closes, taking the machine's history with it.
Kept on the asset, the same records answer real questions: whether this unit costs more to keep than to replace, whether a specific operator is hard on equipment, and whether preventive service is actually happening or just scheduled.
Rented equipment
Rentals invert the priorities. Custody still matters, but the expensive field is the return date, because an overlooked return bills silently and nobody is looking for a charge they forgot they were incurring. Track the rental as equipment, and treat the return date as the alert-worthy field.