Tool and Vehicle Checkout: Custody Records That Stop Losses

Ask your foreman where the rotary hammer you bought in March is right now. If the answer is 'I think Dave has it, or it is in the van', you have the same problem as most field companies I have worked with. Tools circulate between sites, trunks, and garages, and nobody knows the actual state. While work is flowing, nobody asks. The question comes only when a crew stands idle because the one machine they need is somewhere.

This article goes through the numbers — what disappearing tools really cost, why the notebook and the Excel sheet always fail — and then through the system that works: a from-to custody record, ten seconds per handover, that tells you at any moment what is in whose hands.

What untracked tools actually cost

A field company with 15 workers typically holds 40,000 to 80,000 euros in tools, machines, and small equipment. Across a year, 5 to 10 percent of it disappears, breaks without a trace, or stays behind on someone else's site. That is 2,000 to 8,000 euros annually — and that is only purchase value. The bigger line is hidden: the hour two workers spend hunting for an extension cable, or the 40-kilometer drive to fetch a grinder that 'stayed with the crew from last week'.

Here is the part that surprises owners: it is almost never theft. In the companies where I introduced custody tracking, actual theft was rare. Tools vanish legally — another crew borrows one, one rides home in the trunk of a worker who then goes on vacation, one comes back broken and nobody reports it. Every step made sense to somebody. The sum of those steps is a hole in your assets that you notice only at inventory count — if you do inventory counts at all.

Why the notebook and Excel always fail

Nearly every company has tried something. A notebook with the storekeeper: works for two weeks, until the storekeeper is out on a site and tools start leaving without an entry. An Excel sheet: tidy at first, but it lives on one office computer and nobody on a site can see or update it. A signed liability form from the day of hiring: filed away, never looked at again, and it says nothing about where anything is today.

All these attempts share one flaw: the record is kept in a different place and at a different time than the tools actually move. The handover happens at the site gate at seven in the morning; the notebook is in the office. Any system that requires writing up a handover later, somewhere else, collapses within a month. That is not a discipline problem — it is a design problem, and no amount of stern memos fixes it.

How from-to custody records work

The principle is simple: every tool has its own card in the app, and every checkout has a from date and a to date. The foreman, on his phone, at the moment of handover: pick the worker, pick the tool, confirm — ten seconds. From that second it is on record: the hammer drill is with Emir since May 14. When Emir returns it or passes it to someone else, the old custody closes and a new one opens. The record is created where and when the tool moves, which is exactly why it survives where the notebook died.

This gives you two things paper never did. First, a live snapshot: at any moment you see what is with whom, what is free in the warehouse, what is out for repair. Second, history: when a tool comes back damaged, you see whose custody it was in and for how long. Not to run a punishment campaign — but because ownership changes behavior. A worker who knows the grinder is on his name puts it back in the van at the end of the day instead of leaving it on the scaffold.

Vehicles: same principle, bigger numbers

With vehicles the chaos is more expensive. A 30,000-euro van is driven by five different people in a week. Then a speeding ticket arrives from three weeks ago and the argument starts about who was driving. Or the mechanic finds the clutch destroyed and somehow nobody noticed anything squeaking for a month. Without a custody record, every one of these ends in a shrug — and the company pays.

Vehicle checkout from-to answers exactly this: at any moment, it is known who holds which vehicle. A ticket arrives — check the date and time, you have the driver in ten seconds. Damage appears — you know in whose custody it happened. And drivers adapt fast, in a direction you will like: before taking a van, they walk around it and report the scratch the previous driver left, because from the moment of checkout, the vehicle is on them. The inspection you could never enforce with memos starts happening on its own.

What changes in the first month

The first change is an inventory that maintains itself. During the initial entry of tools into the system, companies routinely 'discover' that 10 to 15 percent of listed items do not physically exist — that loss already happened, you are just seeing it for the first time. From that day the hole closes, because every exit has a name and a date attached.

The second change is the end of panic buying. When the foreman can see three grinders sitting free in the warehouse, he does not buy a fourth on the way to the site. For companies with 10 to 20 workers this typically means a few thousand euros less spent on tools per year — not through saving, but through no longer buying what already exists. The third change is quieter: the Monday morning calls asking who has the laser level simply stop.

Where to start

Do not try to catalog every screwdriver — that is how these projects stall in week one. Start with the 20 to 30 most expensive or most-fought-over items: the machines whose absence stops work. Enter them, assign current holders as of today, and from tomorrow run every handover through the record. Small tools can join later, or never; the point is custody of the items that hurt, not a museum catalog.

In Radna evidencija, tool checkout and vehicle checkout are two of the 21 modules and they share the workers and sites you already entered for time tracking — so if your crew is already checking in, adding custody records is an afternoon, not a project. The same ten-second from-to logic covers both a grinder and a van, and it works offline like the rest of the app, because handovers happen in basements and parking garages too. You can see everything that exists at /moduli, how it looks at real companies at /rezultati, and request a process analysis for your own company at /kontakt.