This guide walks the full Foundry AssetHub path using one concrete story: Harbourline Estates owns three sites and cannot say what is inside them. You will see what each destination and stage is for, why it exists, and how Harbourline uses it, with metaphors and diagrams along the way.
Harbourline Estates is a fictional company, and its figures are illustrative. It isn't a customer.
Harbourline runs three commercial sites and everything inside them: 1,412 assets across furniture, IT hardware, rooms and software licences. Today that lives in three spreadsheets that disagree. Facilities cannot say which floor a desk is on. Finance needs a total asset value for the insurance renewal and it takes two weeks to produce. Nobody wants a six-month system project. They want a register they can start using this week.
A filing cabinet has fixed drawers. If you own something that does not fit a drawer, tough. A library instead decides what kinds of things it holds and what you record about each kind. Any new kind of thing then just needs a new catalogue card design. Foundry AssetHub works the same way:
An asset type says what a "Building" or a "Laptop" record looks like: which fields it carries, and whether it can hold things inside it.
Statuses are the small shared vocabulary ("In service", "In repair", "Retired") that everyone uses instead of inventing their own.
Each asset is a record filled in against its card.
Each asset is placed inside its parent: building, room, desk.
Because everything used the same cards and the same words, the dashboard can count and total it without anyone adding up spreadsheets.
Sign in, learn the four things in the sidebar, and understand why the app looks almost empty on day one. It is meant to. You have not told it what you own yet.
Foundry AssetHub gives each organisation its own separate workspace, reached by its own web address and hosted in the UK. Signing in is how it knows which register to show you. Harbourline never sees another organisation's assets, and no one else sees Harbourline's.
Your workspace lives at its own web address, which you choose at signup; Harbourline's is harbourline.foundry-assethub.app. Open it and sign in, either through your organisation's single sign-on or with your email and password, whichever your organisation has set up.
The whole product is four destinations. Learn them once and you are never lost:
The primary button. It is at the top because adding records is the thing you will do most often.
Where you land. Counts, tracked value, breakdowns by type and status, and what changed recently.
The register. Every record, searchable and filterable. Shows a live count next to the name.
The configuration. Where you define what kinds of things exist and what they record.
A brand new workspace has no types, so it has no assets, so every dashboard number is zero. Do not go looking for a demo dataset. Go to Asset types and describe the first kind of thing you own.
Nothing else in Foundry AssetHub works until at least one asset type exists. You literally cannot create an asset without one. Stage 1 is that.
An asset type is the blueprint for one kind of thing you own. It decides the fields every asset of that kind carries, the icon and colour it wears, and whether it can hold other assets inside it.
Many asset systems fix their columns in advance, so tracking a new kind of thing means a developer and a release. Foundry AssetHub is schema-light on purpose: you describe the shape, and the same product manages buildings, chairs, laptops and licences without any code change.
Asset types → New type
| Part of the type | What it does | Harbourline's "IT hardware" |
|---|---|---|
| Name | What this kind of thing is called throughout the app | IT hardware |
| Plural name | Nicer copy in lists and counts; optional | IT hardware |
| Description | A note to whoever adds assets later | Laptops, monitors and peripherals issued to staff |
| Icon | Picked from a set: building, door, chair, laptop, server, monitor, phone, printer, car, wrench and more | laptop |
| Colour | The accent used on cards, badges and the dashboard bar | Amber |
| Allows children | Whether assets of this type can contain other assets | Off; a laptop holds nothing |
| Fields | The custom attributes this kind of thing records | Serial number, warranty end, RAM, support tier |
Each field you add has a type, which decides the input people see and how the value is displayed back:
| Field type | Good for | Extras |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Serial numbers, model names, supplier | None |
| Long text | Condition notes, access instructions | None |
| Number | Capacity, floor area, RAM | Optional unit suffix: sqm, GB, kg |
| Currency | Replacement cost, annual licence fee | Formatted as money |
| Date | Warranty end, next service, renewal | None |
| Yes / No | Under support, PAT tested, insured | None |
| Choice list | Support tier, ownership, condition grade | You define the options |
Every field can also be marked required, given help text, and flagged to show in list, which surfaces it on the compact asset card so you see it without opening the record.
"Allows children" is the one setting worth thinking about before you add records. Ask: would anyone ever say "this is inside that"? Buildings and rooms, yes. A software licence, no. You can change it later, but assets already nested under a type you switch off will need rehoming.
Your types describe what things are. Stage 2 gives everyone the shared words for what condition they are in.
A status is the condition an asset is in, chosen from a short shared list rather than typed freehand. It is the smallest piece of configuration in Foundry AssetHub and quietly the most valuable.
The moment condition is free text, you get "broken", "BROKEN!!", "out of order" and "n/a - see note" describing the same shelf. Nothing can be counted. A fixed status list means the dashboard can tell you, truthfully, how many things are out of action right now.
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | The word shown on every asset badge and in every filter |
| Colour | Drives the badge colour and the segment colour in the dashboard's status bar |
| Description | Optional; the tie-breaker for when two statuses could both apply |
There is no separate statuses screen, and that is deliberate. You create and edit statuses from the status picker on the asset form, at the moment you discover you need one. The picker lists every existing status and offers Create a status below, so the first person to hit "this one is in repair" adds that word once and everybody inherits it.
They are then visible on the Dashboard under By status, alongside a live count of how many assets currently sit in each one. That panel is also where you delete one.
The asset is where it should be and doing its job. The overwhelming majority of records.
Temporarily out of action but still owned and still counted in tracked value.
No longer in use. Kept on the register as a record rather than deleted.
If two proposed statuses would never change what anyone does, they are one status with a note.
Statuses can be deleted from the dashboard's By status panel, and Foundry AssetHub will ask you to confirm. Prune early while the register is small. Once a thousand assets are pointing at a status, removing it is a decision, not a tidy-up.
The thinking is done. Everything from here is the everyday loop, and your agreed status words get typed in for the first time as you add the first asset.
This is where the work actually happens. Every laptop that arrives, every desk that is delivered, every licence that is renewed becomes a record here, and the form reshapes itself around whichever type you pick.
An asset register is only as good as its habits. Foundry AssetHub puts New asset at the top of the sidebar on every screen because the register stays true only if adding to it is faster than emailing someone about it.
Assets → New asset
Regardless of type, every asset carries the same core details, plus whatever custom fields its type defines:
| Detail | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Asset type | Chosen first; it determines the rest of the form |
| Name | How a human refers to it: "MacBook Pro 14"", "Helix HQ Tower" |
| Reference | Foundry AssetHub's own tag for the record: assigned automatically, shown read-only when you edit, and searchable |
| Description | Free text for anything the fields do not cover |
| Status | Its current condition, from the list you agreed in stage 2 |
| Location | Where it physically is, when there is no parent asset to say so |
| Purchase price | What it cost; this is what rolls up into tracked value |
| Parent asset | Optional; the asset this one sits inside (covered in stage 4) |
| Tags | Free-form labels for the cuts your types do not capture |
| Custom fields | Whatever its type defines: serial number, warranty end, RAM… |
The Assets screen is built for the moment someone asks "where is IT-0912 and what state is it in?". You have four tools, and they combine:
One box across name, reference, location and tags. The fastest route when you know any identifying string.
Narrow to one kind of thing ("show me only licences") before scanning.
The audit view: everything currently in repair, across every type at once.
Grid for recognising things by colour and icon; table for dense reconciliation work.
Deleting an asset asks for confirmation and cannot be undone. For things you no longer use but still own, set the status to Retired instead. You keep the record, and it still counts in your totals.
You now have a flat list of things. Stage 4 turns it into a map of what is inside what.
A flat list tells you what you own. Nesting tells you where it is, what it belongs to, and what leaves the building when the building goes.
"We own 340 chairs" is not an answer anyone can act on. "Level 4 of Helix HQ holds 26 desks and 31 chairs, one of which is in repair" is. Hierarchy is what turns a count into a map.
An asset's parent is set on the asset itself, when you create or edit it. Only types with allows children switched on can be chosen as a parent, which is why that switch mattered back in stage 1.
Open any asset and its detail page shows the full chain above it and everything sitting directly below it, each one a link. Following the chain up and down is how you answer location questions without a floor plan.
Types answer "what kind of thing is this?" and hierarchy answers "where is it?". Tags handle everything else: the temporary, cross-cutting groupings that would be absurd as a type:
Everything earmarked for the next hardware refresh, across three types.
The handful of high-value items on their own policy.
Owned by someone else but in your care, a fact no single type captures.
That is a type, not a tag. If you find yourself tagging the kind of thing, make a type.
Everything you have built now pays out. Stage 5 is the screen you did all this for.
The dashboard does not ask you for anything. It reads the register you have been maintaining and answers the four questions people keep asking you by email.
Nobody maintains an asset register for its own sake. They maintain it so that at insurance renewal, at audit, at budget season, the number is ready when they need it. This screen is that number, and it is derived, never typed.
Every record on the register. The honest measure of how complete your rollout is.
How many kinds of thing you have described. Should stabilise early and stay there.
How many are actually in service right now. The gap against total is your problem list.
The sum of purchase prices, formatted as currency. This is the number finance asks for.
Assets by type is a ranked bar list in each type's own colour, so you can see at a glance whether your register is balanced or whether one team has loaded everything and another has loaded nothing. Each row links straight through to the register.
By status lists each status with its live count, then draws them as a single stacked bar. A widening warm segment is the earliest signal that maintenance is falling behind, often before anyone reports it.
The right-hand panel lists the assets that changed most recently, newest first, each with its type, location and status. It shows what changed most recently. It isn't a full change history, but it's the quickest way to spot a data-entry mistake while it's still fresh.
If tracked value looks far too low, people are not entering purchase prices. If one type's bar is flat, that team has not started. Treat the dashboard as a rollout progress report first, and a finance report second.
That is the full journey. The checklist pulls all five stages into one list you can work down in an afternoon.
The whole journey as one list. Work down it and you will have a register that answers questions instead of raising them.
Common questions, answered using the fictional Harbourline example.
Add it to the asset type and every asset of that kind gains it, empty and ready to fill. You don't need a developer or a data migration. This is the whole reason the product is schema-light rather than fixed-column.
Parent is structural: the container is itself an asset you track, and the child moves with it. Location is free text for places you do not track as assets: offsite storage, a supplier's workshop, in transit. Use a parent when you would ever want to ask "what is in here?".
Set its status to Retired instead. Deletion is permanent and removes the record entirely. A retired record still tells you what you had and what it cost, which is exactly what an auditor will ask for.
Between three and eight is a good starting point for most organisations. If two candidate types would record the same fields, make them one type with a choice-list field. If a type would hold fewer than ten assets, it is probably a tag or a field value, not a type.
Replace Harbourline's types with vehicles and trailers, or lab equipment and consumables, or servers and licences. The Define types → Agree statuses → Add assets → Organise → Track path does not change. Only the words on the catalogue cards do. The homepage's fictional Fenmoor College example uses the same path for lab equipment, minibuses and software licences.
It is the sum of the purchase prices entered on individual assets. Nothing is typed on the dashboard itself. If the figure looks low, the cause is almost always assets saved without a price, not a calculation problem.
Yes. Import assets in bulk from a spreadsheet, then tidy up types and statuses as you go. You can also export the register whenever someone needs a file.
Yes. Give them a read-only role. They see the dashboard and the register, but can't change records.
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