Hello everyone,
I’m an IT Manager who’s been building a simple, asset tracking app in AppSheet for our company’s mobile devices. The app lets our QA team check devices out and mark them as returned. It’s been a great project, but I’ve run into a critical point of failure: there’s nothing to stop a user from marking a device as “returned” in the app without physically handing it back to the IT team.
I’m looking for advice from other IT pros on how to enforce this accountability on a low budget.
Current Workflow:
User takes a device.
User updates the device record in the app to “Bounded” to their name.
User is supposed to physically return the device.
User updates the device record to “Available” again.
The Problem:
Step 4 is based entirely on the honor system. A user could mark a device as returned and still have it, which causes inventory issues.
What I’ve Considered (and what I’d like feedback on):
Implement a “Return Pending” Status: My current idea is to change the workflow so that the user’s action sets the device status to “Return Pending.” An IT team member would then have to go into a separate admin view and manually change the status to “Available” after they’ve physically received the device. This seems like the most straightforward solution, but it adds a manual step for IT.
Physical Verification with QR Codes: I could require the IT admin to scan a QR code on the device to “Accept” the return. This provides a digital record of the physical hand-off.
Location Tracking: A proposed solution was to add location tracking to the devices. We’ve decided against this as it’s both expensive to implement on all our devices and, more importantly, raises significant employee privacy concerns.
Has anyone here dealt with this kind of “digital honor system” problem with asset tracking? Are there any clever, no-code/low-code solutions you’ve implemented to bridge the gap between a user’s action in an app and a physical transaction?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!