The information your business tracks is unique to you, so the questions you want to ask of it are unique too. A generic system can filter on generic fields, but it has no idea that you care about PAT test dates, hire rates or calibration flags — so the moment you need to act on that business-specific information, you’re back to scrolling and eyeballing. The data is captured, but it’s effectively trapped, because you can’t query it.
Because Asset Giant lets you filter on your own custom fields, that information becomes fully actionable. Anything you’ve chosen to record, you can also search and report on — which turns your custom fields from passive notes into a powerful way to surface exactly what needs attention.
Ask your own questions
Once your fields are filterable, you can answer the questions that are specific to how you run things:
- “Which items have a PAT test date before the end of this month, so I can plan a testing round?”
- “Show everything tagged with this PO number, so I can reconcile a particular job.”
- “List all equipment flagged as requiring calibration, ready for the next service visit.”
- “Find the items whose next service date has passed, so nothing slips through.”
Lightweight reporting, no report builder
The genuinely useful part is that this gives you targeted reporting without any of the complexity normally attached to it. There’s no report designer to learn and no query language to write. You build a simple rule on a field, and the inventory immediately shows the matching assets — a live, filtered view you can then act on, export, or hand to whoever needs it.
In practice it’s just a few steps:
- Create the custom fields that matter to your business (see Creating and Deleting Custom Fields).
- Fill them in as you add and update assets.
- Add a custom-field filter rule whenever you need to surface a particular set.
Because the filter respects the field’s type — treating a date as a date and a number as a number — the results are precise rather than approximate, which is what makes them safe to base decisions on.
Best Practice: Design a custom field with filtering in mind. A proper Date field, for instance, lets you ask “before today” or “this month”; the same information typed into a free-text notes box can’t be queried at all.
For the broader filtering picture, see Using the Inventory Filters.