Best way to manage asset consumables

[Lily Driscoll]

We’re exploring the most efficient way to manage consumables—items like mice, keyboards, dongles, and cables—in Jira Assets. Our key requirements are:

1. No individual object for every single item
   Creating hundreds of tiny objects clutters the schema and slows everything down.

2. Simple issuance & return workflow
   Service-desk agents should be able to hand out (or return) a consumable in just a click or two.

3. Per-user consumption history
   We still need to report how many of each consumable an employee has received over time (for audit and budget forecasting).

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Questions for those who’ve solved this

• Object design: Did you use a single “Consumable” object type with attributes like Category (mouse, keyboard, etc.) and Quantity on Hand? Or something else?

• Transactions: How do you record each issue/return event—custom “Inventory Transaction” objects, automation rules, or JSM forms?

• Automation: Any Asset automations or Jira Automation rules you’d recommend to keep quantities in sync?

• Reporting: What’s your go-to method for pulling “Who has received how many of X?”—Assets reports, JQL+Charts, Atlassian Analytics?

• Gotchas: Any schema pitfalls, performance tips, or permission quirks we should watch out for?

[Christopher Yen]

Hi @Lily Driscoll in my experience mice & keyboards have never been tracked as a CI (configuration item) or asset for reasons you mentioned, mainly clutter in the database and that they don't really meet the threshold to be a CI.

Could you track them as service requests with a simple form and workflow and a custom type field for asset consumables and then you can report on requests by reporter/customer?

If you use Jira assets more for financial auditing than a CMDB and this is necessary in the assets database for compliance reasons then I would still probably start with a service request and create/update the assets via automation using what you mentioned, a single object type with an attribute for whether it's a mice or keyboard etc.