Caretakers & Establishments
A person can be answerable for a laptop. A branch office cannot. When equipment is held by a place, a team, a project or an outside company, somebody still has to be the name on the record — and that name is the caretaker.
Why this exists
Assets go to non-people all the time: a projector belongs to Meeting Room 2, a set of tools sits with the Field Operations team, three laptops are out with a contractor. Recording only "Meeting Room 2" answers where and never answers who — and "who" is the entire question when something goes missing, when an auditor asks, or when the equipment has to come back.
The three roles
| Role | What it means | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Primary caretaker | The one answerable name. Reminders, return requests and acceptance all land on this person. | Exactly one in force at a time, per place/team/project. |
| Backup caretaker | Somebody who can act while the primary is away. Carries no accountability of their own. | Any number. |
| Accountable owner | The manager who answers for the whole location or team, above the day-to-day caretaker. | Any number. |
"Exactly one primary" is enforced by the system, not by discipline — a second appointment while one is already in force is refused with an explanation naming the person who currently holds it. Two people who both believe they are answerable is the same as nobody being answerable.
When a caretaker is compulsory
Handing equipment to anything that is not a person asks for a caretaker on the endorsement itself —
you cannot complete the handover without naming one. That is asset_caretaker_required_for_non_user,
on by default. Turning it off is available for companies that genuinely track equipment by location
only, but it removes the one name a chase-up can be addressed to.
Appointing one
Safekeep → Custody → Caretakers. The tab shows every place, team and project that currently holds equipment, the caretaker on each, and — first, in red — the ones holding equipment with nobody named. That gap list is the point of the page; everything else is reference.
Candidates are not a free list of all staff. For an office the picker offers the people actually assigned to it; for a team, its members; for a project, the people on it. Naming somebody from an unrelated department as the caretaker of a branch office is usually a mistake, and offering it as an easy default is how it happens.
Handing the role over
People move on, and the roster has to move with them. Replacing a primary caretaker is a handover, not an edit: the outgoing person's record is closed with a reason and the incoming person is invited to take it on.
Asking for confirmation is the default (asset_caretaker_assumption_requires_acceptance).
Becoming answerable for a room full of equipment is not something that should happen to somebody
silently while they are on leave — and a refusal, with its reason, is far more useful than a roster
that looks correct and is not.
The establishment workspace
Clicking a place opens its own page: what it holds, who its caretakers are, endorsements it has not confirmed yet, and its recent activity — four tabs, each loaded only when you open it.
It is a workspace, not a report. Everything a branch manager does about equipment — see what is here, see who is answerable, chase what has not been confirmed — is on one page rather than scattered across four filtered lists.
Who can see which establishments
By default anyone who can see custody can see every establishment. Switching on
asset_enforce_establishment_scope narrows it: you see the places you are assigned to
and the ones you are caretaker of, and staff holding View all establishments still see
everything. It ships off because most companies do not want a branch manager blind to the
warehouse — but the option is there for the ones that do.
The nightly check
Every night the system looks for rosters that have quietly stopped being true and raises them:
- Caretakers who have left — a primary caretaker whose account is no longer active. The roster is flagged and the people who can fix it are told once, not nightly; a warning that arrives every day becomes a warning nobody reads.
- Equipment with nobody answerable — a place or team holding assets with no caretaker in force, which is what the gap list on the Caretakers tab shows.
Neither is repaired automatically. Deciding who becomes answerable for somebody else's equipment is a decision, and the system's job is to make sure a human is asked to make it.