Asset tagging for schools, colleges and universities

For classroom and hostel furniture, aluminium barcode tags at 39 × 13 mm (KSh 50 per tag) are the workhorse. They survive daily student handling, cleaning and the occasional repaint, and they stay scannable for nine years or more.

For ICT equipment, use tamper-evident tags. The risk in a computer lab is not that a tag falls off — it is that a tag gets moved from a working machine to a broken one. A tamper-evident tag fragments if lifted, which ends that conversation.

For laboratory equipment exposed to chemicals and heat, acetone-activated aluminium is the right call. The bond is permanent and the tag will not lift when a bench gets wiped down with solvent.

For high-volume, low-value indoor items where budget is the constraint, polyester tags start at KSh 35 and do the job perfectly well indoors.

One honest note: we will usually recommend a mix rather than a single tag type for a school, because the environments inside one compound genuinely differ. A single spec for the whole institution costs you either durability in the lab or money in the dormitory.

Tag during the long holidays. Trying to tag a classroom while a lesson is running wastes your staff's time and ours, and the count will be wrong because half the assets are in use elsewhere. An April, August or December window lets a team work through an entire compound uninterrupted.

Give yourself at least six weeks between the count and your audit date, so there is time to resolve discrepancies rather than explain them.

Public schools and universities reporting under IPSAS carry the record-keeping obligations that come with it. Institutions receiving capitation or development funds are expected to show what the money bought and that it still exists. Boards of Management carry personal accountability for institutional property, and that accountability transfers when the board changes — which is precisely when a clean, tagged register is worth most.

A register that lists “20 computers” as a single line will not satisfy any of that. Each machine needs its own identifier, its own acquisition cost and its own location.