Assets Reference Public

Counting & Verifying

Using the scan page on a phone to count equipment: typing or scanning a tag, the optional camera, what the screen shows you before you commit, and why counting the same thing twice is safe.

Guide version: r1 Module version: 1.11.0 Updated: 2026-08-25 Estimated time: 5 min 4 views 0% helpful
Custody & Service

Counting & Verifying

The scan page is where an audit actually happens: one person, one phone, walking a floor with a hand on the equipment. It is built for exactly that, and it is deliberately usable with no camera, no barcode scanner and a poor connection.

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Where it lives. Open a campaign that is Counting and press Scan (ams/audits/scan/…), or use the Scan button on the campaign's card. It needs the Perform Audits permission and nothing else — an auditor does not need to be able to plan or certify anything.

Three ways to identify an asset

All three land in the same box, and all three work the same way afterwards.

HowWhat to do
Type itEnter the asset tag, the serial, or the code from the label. Press Enter.
Hardware scannerPoint and pull the trigger. A scanner types the code and presses Enter for you — nothing to set up.
Phone cameraPress Use camera and hold the label in view. Optional; see below.
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The camera is a convenience, not the method. A phone camera needs a secure connection (https) and a permission grant, and neither is guaranteed on a warehouse handset. Typing is the primary path and never goes away. If the camera cannot start, the page says why in plain words rather than leaving you pressing a button that does nothing.

What you see before you commit

Identifying an asset does not record anything. The page first shows you what it thinks you are holding — the title, tag, serial and category — together with what the register expected: who should have it, where, and which caretaker is answerable. You compare, then you record. Two warnings can appear at this point:

MessageWhat it means
This item already has a resultSomebody has counted it. Not a refusal — recording again replaces the earlier verdict, which is sometimes exactly right — but you should know before you do it.
This asset is not in the campaign's scopeYou have found something the campaign was not looking for. Recording it adds it, which is usually what you want: an asset in the room is a fact regardless of what the plan said.
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If a serial matches more than one asset, the page says so and refuses to guess. Serial numbers come from the manufacturer and are not guaranteed unique across your register; asset tags are yours and are unique by construction. Scan the tag instead.

Recording what you found

Leave the result on "Decide from what I record" and the conclusion is worked out from the condition, location and serial you enter — which is what you want most of the time. Override it when you already know: an asset you simply cannot find is Missing, and nothing else on the form matters.

Where the campaign requires a photo, the page asks for one and will not accept the finding without it. That rule is set on the campaign, not here — see Audit Campaigns.

Counting the same thing twice is safe

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A dropped connection is normal on a phone, and a retry must never count an asset twice. Every submission carries a key of its own. If the page is not sure the first attempt got through and you send it again, the system recognises it as the same observation: you get "already recorded", one entry in the evidence log, and the progress bar does not move twice. Press it again without worrying.

Why it may refuse to let you count something

Most campaigns are set so that the person holding an asset may not audit it. If you are the recorded holder, the page will decline and ask for somebody else to count that item. It is not a permissions problem — an audit somebody performs on their own equipment evidences nothing, which is the whole reason the rule exists.

Progress and the recent list

The bar at the top is the campaign's real progress, recalculated from the items each time you record — not a local tally that could drift from what your colleagues are doing. Underneath, Just counted shows your last few submissions so you can see at a glance that what you meant to record is what went in.

Counting a single asset without a campaign

An asset's own page still carries a Record audit action, and it still works exactly as it did: pick the condition, set when the next audit is due, add a note. What changed is that if that asset happens to be in an open campaign and has not been counted yet, the count lands on that campaign's line too — so a floor walk and a campaign can no longer record two versions of the same day's count and disagree.

A note on handheld scanners and integrations

Companies running dedicated scanning hardware can post counts directly through the API, using a scope granted for auditing alone — deliberately narrower than the permission to edit the register, since a scanner needs to record counts and nothing else. The same retry protection applies: send the same observation twice and the second is recognised rather than counted.

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