AssetTrack vs Excel: the honest comparison.

What Excel is good at

Almost every asset register starts in Excel or Google Sheets. It's free, it's familiar, and it's there. For the first 50 assets and the first three months, it does the job. It quietly stops doing the job somewhere between 100 assets and the first audit — but by then, the spreadsheet has become the system of record and nobody wants to migrate it.

• Free, familiar, no procurement cycle
• Total control over fields, formulas and layout
• Works for a register of 20–50 assets in a single team's hands
• No vendor lock-in (until it becomes the system of record)
• Excellent for one-off analysis and pivot tables on extracted data

Where Excel leaves gaps

• No unique-serial enforcement — duplicates appear silently
• No signed chain of custody — handovers are emails at best
• No mobile audit app — counting assets is a printed page and a clipboard
• Depreciation is a formula somebody wrote once and nobody else understands
• Replacement value drifts because nobody owns updating it
• Two people editing at once = conflict resolution by guess
• Audit trail is whatever the file's version history happens to remember
• Multi-site / multi-team / MSP scenarios fall apart immediately

When AssetTrack is the better fit

Your register has grown past about 100 assets, more than one person needs to touch it, you've had an audit ask 'who had this on that date?' that you couldn't answer crisply, or you need to produce an insurance schedule and finding the right column is taking longer than it should. The migration is a one-afternoon CSV import — AssetTrack reads the spreadsheet you already have.

When Excel is the better fit

You have fewer than 50 assets, one person owns the register, you don't need signed handovers or audit-grade chain of custody, and the register doesn't feed an insurance schedule or fixed-asset register. In that world, Excel is still the right answer — for now.