Capital Planning and Budgeting
Local Government and School Accountability
Capital Planning and Budgeting
A Tutorial for Local Government Officials
Module 1 - The Capital Improvement Plan
Assets Inventory: Information to Capture
The following information may be useful to capture:
- Identification of the asset or facility
- Engineering description
- Location
- Physical dimensions
- Age and condition
- Maintenance history and warranty information
- Book value and replacement cost
- Staff hours invested annually in repairs
- Record of interruptions and backlogs of services due to aging or inadequate facilities or equipment
- Any health or safety code violations that are found
- Level of resiliency needed for that asset (resiliency is the ability of the local government to respond to and recover from a disaster)
View the sample inventory sheet [pdf]
Some organizations choose to keep maintenance information in a system separate from the capital asset inventory and a local government may want to consider whether this design best meets its needs. Regardless of the number of databases kept, gathering information for a realistic appraisal of current capital assets is crucial to an accurate needs assessment.
It is also important to develop a policy requiring periodic measurement of the physical condition of all existing capital assets and to incorporate that information in the records, which will help to both plan for future asset replacement and calculate the cost of deferred maintenance.