When the Spreadsheet Becomes the Liability
Physical facility audits conducted via spreadsheet have a characteristic failure mode: they capture what the auditor remembered to write down, not what was actually there. A row that reads "Conference Room B — 12 chairs, 1 projector, 1 whiteboard" is accurate at the moment of entry and wrong by the end of the quarter. The chair with the broken caster that should be on a replacement request. The projector that's actually a loaner from IT that never got returned. The inventory label that was replaced with a new asset tag when the first one was damaged, and now the serial number doesn't match the property record.
Facilities managers who rely on spreadsheet audits spend enormous amounts of time reconciling discrepancies between what the sheet says and what insurance, procurement, and IT are each independently tracking. The audit itself becomes a source of truth for a period of weeks, then slowly loses authority as changes accumulate outside the record.
The audit that catches nothing is worse than no audit at all, because it creates a false confidence that the data is accurate.
Seven Photo Fields Are Not Overkill
The multi-image structure of this template — Main Pic, Room Pic, Model Pic, Product Label Pic, Inventory Label Pic, and two Sub Pics — seems excessive until you've been on the losing end of a disputed asset claim.
Main Pic is the item in situ. This is your proof that the asset exists and is in the location the record says it's in. Room Pic establishes spatial context — not just which room, but where in the room, which matters for layout audits, space planning, and post-incident reconstruction. Model Pic captures the model number as seen on the unit, which frequently differs from what's in the procurement system because field changes, component swaps, and vendor substitutions happen at delivery and aren't always reflected in paperwork.
Product Label Pic and Inventory Label Pic are where the audit earns its legal weight. If these two labels show different asset numbers, that discrepancy is now documented rather than glossed over. This happens more often than anyone admits: the original inventory tag gets damaged, a replacement is applied from a different asset number series, and for years both numbers persist in different systems. The photo evidence creates an undeniable record of what the physical object actually shows.
The INV BARCODE field pairs with the label photo to give you a scanned confirmation that the asset number in the record matches the tag on the object. The scan closes the loop in a way that typing a number never does — transcription errors are eliminated, and the scan timestamp is tied to the entry date.
The Room as the Unit of Work
Department, Room Name, and Room Number as separate fields rather than a single location field is an architectural choice that matters for how the audit data is used downstream.
Department ownership drives cost allocation and replacement budgeting. Room Name and Room Number drive physical retrieval and maintenance dispatch. These are different queries run by different people for different purposes. Keeping them separate means a facilities director can pull everything owned by Cardiology, and the maintenance team can pull everything in Room 214, and neither query requires parsing a combined location string.
When an auditor is walking a building with a mobile device, the room number is the fastest orienting field — it's what's on the door. Filtering by room number while standing in the room gives you a preloaded list of what should be there, which is exactly the workflow a physical verification audit requires.
Filtering all records with a missing or null INV BARCODE against the room list gives you the exact work order for a follow-up sweep: the rooms where barcode capture was incomplete.