Building an asset inventory in SharePoint

Last updated: July 31, 2026

For most organisations under a few hundred devices, a dedicated IT asset management product is more machinery than the problem needs. A SharePoint list plus a decent component answers the four questions people actually ask: who has it, where is it, when does it expire, and what is spare.

The fastest route is to describe it to Sharelio, the AI platform for building SharePoint tools: “an asset inventory with asset tag, type, assigned person, location, purchase date, warranty end and status, highlighting warranties expiring in the next 90 days”. The list is provisioned in your tenant with the right column types and the component goes on your IT page.

Say this before you start, though, because it decides whether the project is worth doing: building the inventory is the easy part. Keeping it accurate is the whole job. An inventory nobody updates is worse than none, because people trust it.

The columns that earn their place

Column	Type	Why
Asset tag	Text, unique	The thing on the sticker. Everything else hangs off it.
Type	Choice	Laptop, monitor, phone, licence. Keep the list short.
Assigned to	Person	A real person column, not text — it links to the directory and survives name changes.
Status	Choice	In use, spare, in repair, retired. This is what makes the tool useful.
Location	Choice or text	Office, home, warehouse.
Purchase date / warranty end	Date	The whole reason for the expiry view.
Notes	Multi-line text	Where the truth actually lives. Do not omit it.

Resist adding serial number, MAC address, purchase order, supplier and cost unless someone has named the question each one answers. Every extra column is a field someone has to fill in for the tool to stay accurate, and unfilled columns are how inventories quietly become fiction.

The three routes

Route	Cost	Time	Good for
List with a formatted view	€0	An afternoon	Getting started. Colour the status column and you are most of the way there.
List plus a component	Free plan, then flat per tenant	Minutes	A proper view on the IT page, filters that stick, an expiry list and counts by status
Dedicated ITAM product	Per asset or per user, monthly	Weeks	Hundreds of devices, automated discovery, compliance obligations

The honest boundary for the third row: if you need automated discovery — devices reporting themselves rather than being typed in — none of the SharePoint routes will get you there. That is what Intune and dedicated ITAM tools are for, and if you already have Intune, check what it already knows before building anything.

Keeping it accurate

The four habits that decide whether this survives its first year:

Tie updates to events that already happen. Onboarding, offboarding, a repair. If updating the inventory is a separate task, it will not happen.
One owner. Not a team. A person whose job includes it.
Make the gaps visible. A view of assets with no assignee, or not touched in a year, turns quiet decay into a visible list somebody can clear.
Audit once a year, physically, and accept that the count will be wrong the first time.

That third habit is the one worth building into the tool itself, because it is the only one the tool can help with.

Frequently asked questions

Can we scan barcodes into a SharePoint list?

Not from a web page on a desktop. A Power App on a phone can use the camera to scan a barcode into the list, which is one of the genuinely good reasons to add a Power App to this — and it works alongside a SharePoint-based inventory rather than replacing it.

How many assets before SharePoint stops coping?

Lists hold far more than any organisation has assets. The practical limit is the 5,000-item view threshold, and even that is a configuration matter: indexed columns and filtered views handle tens of thousands comfortably. The pressure to leave SharePoint usually comes from wanting automated discovery, not from volume.

Should we track software licences in the same list?

Separate list. The columns are different — seats, renewal date, cost centre, owner — and mixing them means both halves have empty columns. They can sit on the same page as two components without being the same list.

Who should be able to edit it?

Edit rights for IT, read for everyone else. Wide read access is what makes people trust it and report errors, which is the cheapest accuracy mechanism you have. Restricting visibility to the IT team is the usual instinct and it removes the only free correction loop.

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