How to Track Equipment for a Remote Team

Tracking equipment for a remote team means keeping one record per item that says who has it, which address it was shipped to, when the person confirmed it arrived, and how it comes back, and then getting the employee to confirm that record rather than relying on someone walking past a desk. Hybrid and remote employees are 17% more likely to not return company equipment than on-site staff (Capterra Employee Offboarding Survey, 2022). That gap is not surprising once you think about how a remote handover works: the laptop goes in a box, the box goes to an address, and unless someone writes down what happened, the record is a guess. This guide covers what to record, how to hand equipment over by post, and how to get it back when someone leaves.

What makes tracking remote equipment different from an office?

The difference is that nothing gets seen. In an office you can walk past a desk and notice the second monitor, but with a remote team every laptop, monitor and headset sits in a home you will never visit, so the only evidence you have is whatever was written down when it shipped.

This is not a niche problem any more. Among remote-capable US employees, 51% work hybrid and 26% are fully remote, which leaves 23% fully on site (Gallup, Q2 2025). For most companies the equipment that leaves the building is most of the equipment.

Two other things change when people are remote. Addresses move, because people relocate and forget to tell you, so the address on the record goes stale. And equipment moves informally, because a spare monitor gets posted from one colleague to another without anyone updating the list. The basic assignment model is covered in our guide to tracking employee equipment. This post is about what you add on top when the person holding the item is somewhere else.

What should you record for each piece of remote equipment?

Record the same core fields you would use in an office (item, serial number, purchase date, price, warranty end and assigned person) plus four that only exist because the person is remote: the address it was shipped to, the carrier tracking number, the date the employee confirmed receipt, and the agreed return method.

The confirmation date is the one most people skip, and it is the one that does the work. Without it, "assigned to Sarah" means you sent it, not that she has it.

How do you hand over equipment to someone you never meet?

Treat the shipment as the handover. Ship to the address on the record, log the tracking number, ask the employee to confirm receipt and condition in writing (a photo in a reply is enough), and have them sign an equipment agreement electronically before or on the day the box arrives.

The agreement is what turns a delivery into an assignment. It should say what was sent, that it stays company property, what reasonable care looks like, and how and when it comes back. We have a free employee equipment agreement template you can copy, and the whole thing fits on one page.

For staff in other countries the shipping itself gets harder, because customs, import duty and delivery times vary by destination, and a laptop can sit in a depot for a week. There are services built for this (GroWrk, Firstbase and Workwize all ship, store and retrieve devices across many countries), and they make sense once you have enough people abroad to be shipping every month. For a team of ten to thirty people, a tracked courier and a good record is usually enough, as long as someone logs the tracking number the day it ships.

How do you keep the record accurate without walking the office?

Ask the employees. A quarterly message asking each person to confirm the equipment listed against their name, with a reply only if something is wrong, replaces the walk-around audit and costs each person a couple of minutes.

The reason this works is that the people holding the equipment are the only ones who can see it. You cannot count laptops you cannot reach, but you can ask thirty people to look at a list of two or three items each. Anyone who moved house or passed a monitor to a colleague tends to mention it when prompted, and almost nobody mentions it unprompted.

A self-service view makes the confirmation step lighter. AssetJay's employee portal gives each person a login (a magic link, no password) that shows only the equipment assigned to them, so confirming is a glance at a page rather than a hunt through old emails. It is a Pro feature. On the free plan you would do the same thing with a message and a filtered spreadsheet, and that works fine at small scale. If you want the full walk-through of a periodic count, our equipment audit guide covers it.

How do you get equipment back when a remote employee leaves?

Start the return the day notice is given, not on the last day. Send a prepaid, pre-addressed box or label to the address on record, put a return deadline in the offboarding checklist, and only tick the item back in when it physically arrives and the serial number matches the record.

The numbers on what happens otherwise are not good. 71% of HR professionals who offboarded someone in the past year reported at least one unreturned item, at an average of $1,963 per departing employee (Capterra, 2022). It is also the thing companies ask about most: in an analysis of 3,977 customer calls between April 2024 and August 2026, offboarding and retrieval came up unprompted in 22.6% of them, tied for the most-discussed topic (GroWrk, 2026).

Most of the friction is practical rather than malicious. The person does not have a box, does not want to pay for shipping, and has a new job starting Monday. Removing those three obstacles before the last day gets most equipment back. For the cases where it still does not come back, our post on when an employee won't return equipment covers the legal and practical options.

Do you need software for this, or will a spreadsheet do?

A spreadsheet works for a remote team up to around 50 assets, as long as one person owns it and the confirmation step actually happens. Past that, or once you want employees to see their own list, a tracking tool earns its place because the confirmation and return steps stop depending on someone remembering to ask.

We have written about where the spreadsheet stops working in general, and the remote case reaches that point sooner, because the tracking number, confirmation date and condition photo per item are awkward to keep in cells and easy to keep on an asset record.

One limit to be clear about. AssetJay tracks who has what, holds the receipts and serial numbers, and runs the offboarding checklist, but it does not ship boxes and it does not lock or wipe a laptop remotely. If you need remote wipe, that is a mobile device management job (Kandji, Jamf or Intune), and you would run it alongside the asset record rather than instead of it. The asset record tells you which device to wipe. The MDM does the wiping.