For many years organizations have affixed labels to their valuable assets such as computers, furniture, tools, and specialized machinery. Metal tags with a stamped serial number or tags with barcodes on them are commonplace.

When the time comes to take inventory of what assets are still in the field the person charged with recording them must visually read the tag or be able to point and shoot a hand held scanner at the barcode to record the asset number.

Bar coding technology provides the capability of tagging assets with unique identifiers without requiring asset locators to manually record identifiers in the field.

Bar codes may be scanned using hand held computers and asset identifiers can be recorded and later uploaded into an asset management system for audit trail and reconciliation purposes.