A piece of paper on a long walk
Somewhere right now, a facilities supervisor is filling out a disposal form for a rooftop unit that was hauled away three weeks ago. The form will sit in a tray, ride in someone's truck, get set down on a desk in accounting, and wait. If it is lucky, someone signs it. If the approver is on vacation, it waits longer. And in a good number of the companies I have worked with, there is no approver at all, so the form simply gets processed by whoever picks it up.
Meanwhile, the asset is still on the books. It is still depreciating. It may still be on the insurance schedule and the property tax return. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. The supervisor did his part, accounting did theirs when the paper arrived, and the gap in between belonged to no one.
I have been part of more than a hundred construction-in-progress and fixed asset implementations, and that walk from facilities to accounting shows up in almost every one of them. Sometimes it is paper, sometimes it is an email with a spreadsheet attached, sometimes it is a hallway conversation that never becomes anything at all. The medium changes. The walk does not.
It isn't a people problem, it's a path problem
When the books are wrong, the instinct is to look for the person who dropped the ball. I understand the instinct. But after enough of these projects, I have come to believe that people mostly do what the path in front of them makes easy, and very little of what it makes hard.
Look at what the disposal form is up against. Facilities works in a maintenance system, accounting works in a fixed asset register, and the two have never been introduced. The policy says disposals need approval, but nothing in the day actually asks for one. The form has six fields and the supervisor knows the answers to four of them, so the other two stay blank. Nobody tells accounting the unit is gone because nobody told facilities that accounting needed to know.
None of that is laziness. It is a reasonable person working inside an unreasonable arrangement. We wrote a policy, trained people on it once, and then built a workday that quietly asks them to ignore it. When that happens, the behavior we see is not the problem. It is the report card on the process.
That matters, because it changes where accountability lands. If the path is the problem, then the people who own the path, which is to say leadership, own the fix.
When the systems start talking, people change
Lately I have been working with a group that comes at the same building from every direction. Kimon Onuma's model gives the building and each of its components one shared identity, along with a map of how everything relates. Anto's CNS/CP Connection Profile governs how independent systems find each other and decide whether to trust what they are told. Greggory Don Butler's TA-14 decides whether a proposed action has the evidence, authority and standing to go ahead. Mike Bordenaro and the Asset Leadership Network bring the owners and the standards to the same table. My seat is the fixed asset register: is the information complete, reconciled, matched to what is really there, and fit to support a decision?
What I have watched from my side is the part that rarely makes the headlines. When different departments and systems start working from the same policies, and each system is connected to the next, the behavior around them starts to change. The facilities supervisor no longer has to remember that accounting exists, because the work order tells accounting itself. The approver no longer has to be chased, because the request already knows who they are. And the missing data starts to fill in, not because someone ran a cleanup project, but because each question is finally asked of the person who knows the answer, at the moment they know it.
That is what I always imagined systems were for. Not storing records in separate rooms, but serving as the line of communication between everyone who touches an asset: the fixed asset on the books, the equipment in the building, and the people who plan, build, run, fund and retire them. People are assets too, with a lifecycle of their own. They join, learn, change roles and eventually leave, and a process that only works while one particular person is in the chair is not really a process.
So let the technology own the policy, the routing and the reminders, and let people keep the judgment, inside a governance structure everyone can see. Do that, and data integrity stops being a year-end cleanup and becomes the normal state of things. Wouldn't that be nice?
What if the process walked the paper?
So what would that look like for our disposal form? Instead of asking people to remember the policy, we would wrap what we know around the work itself, so the right step was also the easy one.
Picture the same rooftop unit. When the work order closes as “removed,” the disposal starts on its own. The supervisor is asked the two or three questions only he can answer, in plain words: was it scrapped, sold, or traded in, and is there a photo of it gone? The request goes to the approver your policy actually names, not to whoever is nearest the inbox. If the approver is out, it goes to their backup instead of into a drawer. Accounting sees it the same day, with the asset already matched, the documentation already attached, and the reason already recorded.
And when something is missing, the system does not just throw up a red flag. It says what is missing and why it matters:
“This disposal can't be completed yet. There's no proof the unit was removed, and the approval is from someone outside your policy's approval list.”
That is the difference between a gate and a guide. A gate stops you. A guide tells you how to get through.
This is not a new idea in other parts of life. A car tells you when the door is open. A tax program asks you the next question instead of handing you the whole form. We have simply not extended that courtesy to the people who manage a company's largest pool of physical capital. They are still carrying paper down the hall.
I want to be careful here, because “all automated” can sound like “no people.” I mean the opposite. The judgment calls stay with people: whether a roof project is a repair or an improvement, whether an exception to policy is warranted. What gets automated is the remembering, the routing, the chasing and the record-keeping, so that the people making those calls have the evidence in front of them and the decision gets written down for whoever comes next.
What we're building with FAHA
This is what I am building now. FAHA, the Fixed Asset Holistic Approach, takes the Health Assessment I have run by hand for years and turns it into a workspace a company keeps and uses every day. It starts with the Health module, and CapEx and Assets follow. The idea is simple: plan it, place it, prove it, with the guidance built into each step instead of living in a binder.
In practice, that means a few things the disposal form never had:
- Your policy becomes the rules the system checks against. FAHA drafts a fixed asset policy from your assessment answers, your controller adopts it, and from then on every capitalization, transfer and disposal is measured against your own thresholds and your own approvers.
- A hold comes with a reason. When something doesn't meet policy, FAHA says what is missing in plain language and who can resolve it.
- It asks before anyone decides. For judgment calls like repair or capitalize, it asks the questions a seasoned consultant would ask and saves the answers as evidence on the record.
- Every decision is written down. Exceptions, approvals and the reasoning behind them go into a decision log that outlasts whoever made the call.
- People stay in charge. FAHA suggests and explains. A person on your team approves, and the record shows who did.
And it doesn't ask anyone to give up the systems they already use. The maintenance system stays the maintenance system and the ledger stays the ledger. FAHA's job is to make sure they are talking about the same asset, and that the right person hears about it at the right moment.
How do I start? Check your data first
You do not need new software to begin. You need an honest look at where the walk breaks down today, and your own data will tell you if you ask it.
- Compare what facilities removed with what accounting retired. Pull last year's closed work orders marked removed or replaced, and match them to disposals in the fixed asset register. Every unmatched item is an asset still on your books that isn't in your building.
- Measure the walk. For the disposals you did record, compare the date the asset left with the date it came off the books. The gap, in days, is your process telling you how long the paper travels.
- Count the signatures. Of last year's disposals, how many have an approval from someone your policy actually names? If the answer is “we don't have an approval step,” that is your first finding, not a footnote.
- Look for the blank fields. Which fields on your forms or records are empty most often? Those are the questions people can't answer at the moment you are asking them, which usually means you are asking the wrong person or asking at the wrong time.
- Ask the people walking the paper. Spend an hour with a facilities supervisor and an hour with your fixed asset accountant. Ask each what they wish the other knew. You will hear the missing connection in their own words.
Once you can see the breaks, the guidance follows naturally: a trigger where something should start, a question where information is missing, a named approver where there is none, and a record of each decision so you aren't relying on someone's memory at year end.
The question for leadership
We spend a lot of energy asking employees to follow policy. I would like to see us spend at least as much asking whether our processes make following policy possible. If a disposal still depends on a piece of paper finding its way down the hall, that is not a training problem. It is a design choice, and it is ours to change.
The pieces already exist: a shared identity for the building, a way for systems to trust each other, a check before anything consequential happens, and a register that matches reality. I am grateful to Kimon, Greggory, Anto, Mike and the Asset Leadership Network for building them in the open alongside me. FAHA is my part of it, bringing that connection into the everyday work of facilities and accounting. For where each of those pieces sits across an asset's life, see the Design to Disposal lifecycle map.
If the walk from facilities to accounting sounds familiar in your organization, I would genuinely like to hear how it plays out where you are. Every company's version of that hallway is a little different, and the differences are where the good ideas come from. Start a conversation →
