Doing the same small task to fifty items one at a time is the kind of work that drains an afternoon and the will to live with it. It comes up more often than you’d expect — when you first set the system up, when you reorganise after taking on new premises, or when a batch of new stock arrives and all needs labelling. Tackled one record at a time, these jobs are so tedious that they get put off, and the system slowly falls behind reality as a result.
Bulk actions remove that drudgery. You select a whole batch of assets at once and apply a single action to all of them together, turning an afternoon of repetition into a few clicks. It’s the difference between a setup or tidy-up that actually gets finished and one that’s perpetually half-done.
Handle the many like the one
The strength of bulk actions is that they cover the operations you most often need to repeat:
- Select broadly or precisely — tick everything, or hand-pick a batch.
- Act once on the whole set — add them all to a list, move them to a folder, queue them for label printing, or export them together.
- Save real time during setup, reorganisations and any job that touches a lot of items at once.
Most powerful in combination with filters
Bulk actions become genuinely transformative when paired with filtering. Because you can first narrow the inventory to exactly the items you want — using any combination of type, location, status or custom-field filters — and then select them all, you can target a very specific set with surgical precision. For example:
- Filter to every tool that doesn’t yet have a QR label.
- Select the whole filtered set.
- Queue them all for printing in one action, then print a full sheet of labels.
The same pattern works for moving a site’s worth of kit to a new location, adding a job’s equipment to a list, or exporting a filtered selection for a report. The filter defines the “who”, and the bulk action does the “what” — to all of them at once.
Best Practice: Always filter first, then select all. It’s faster and far less error-prone than scrolling a long list and ticking items by hand, and it makes sure you catch every matching asset.
For the full guide, see Using Bulk Actions.