Government & Education vertical
Asset tracking for government and education
Federal, state and local agencies, school districts and universities are audited for the chain of custody of IT assets, voting equipment, evidence, vehicles, textbooks and lab equipment, often for an asset’s entire life span. InThing replaces hallway audits and pen-and-paper logs with continuous, provable accountability.
Industry problems
Accountability shouldn’t peak once a year.
Before fiscal year-end, staff print a spreadsheet with thousands of rows and walk the halls with barcode scanners. The “location unknown” list grows again, and finance asks questions nobody can answer. Tracking items for their whole life with barcodes alone is error-prone and labor intensive.
Meanwhile the pressure rises: devices bought with ESSER funds near the end of their useful lives, federal equipment above the threshold still needs property records and a physical inventory at least every two years, and CISA’s K-12 Cybersecurity Foundations include safeguarding devices and assets.
- Federal & state
- IT equipment and data centers, sensitive documents, government inventory, weapons and supplies
- Elections
- Voting machines, ballot bags, precinct kits, USB sticks, memory backups
- K-12
- Textbooks, laptops and tablets, AV equipment, lab supplies, rental instruments
- Universities
- Lab equipment, research materials and campus IT assets
Use cases
What public agencies and schools track with InThing.
Each use case page explains the outcomes, workflows, technology fit and proof in detail.
Capital assets & equipment
Lab instruments, IT and data-center hardware, fixed assets and voting equipment: found in seconds, audited in minutes.
Plant tools & MHE
MRO tools, tool cribs, calibrated instruments, forklifts, AGVs and yard vehicles: issued, located and accounted for.
Documents & textbooks
Sensitive files, evidence, election materials and textbooks, with chain of custody and audits measured in days, not weeks.
How InThing applies
Continuous assurance instead of annual audit chaos.
Asset audits & compliance
Exception lists every week: assets not seen for 30 days, still assigned to former staff or missing since a loaner program.
InVault workflow
Location & inventory
Room-by-room inventory with Visium Mobile; RFID reads through shelves, cupboards and backpacks.
InVault workflow
Reservations & checkouts
Self-service check-out and check-in for shared equipment, kits and loaner devices.
InVault workflow
Utilization & condition
Which devices people use, which need maintenance and which sit idle.
InVault workflow
Budget & spend management
Plan refresh cycles from usage data and check what’s available before buying.
InVault workflow
Authorized observers
Verifiable, time-bounded presence for observers and inspectors in restricted rooms.
InStep visitors
Customer story
A chain of custody for elections.
City of Philadelphia
Philadelphia replaced pen-and-paper tracking of voting equipment with Zebra MC3330 handheld and FX9600 fixed RFID readers and InThing’s Voting Equipment Tracking Solution (VETS), first used in November 2020. The city tagged about 1,700 items for that election and scaled to about 17,000 items in November 2021, managing chain of custody from the warehouse audit to post-election reconciliation.
The old way of doing things is not going to work.
Nick Custodio, Deputy Commissioner, Office of Chairwoman Lisa Deeley
3,500voting machines across 720 polling locations
50%lower equipment reconciliation cost per election cycle
0wrong or short deliveries to polling stations
Compliance & integration
Records auditors can trust.
- Federal equipment
- Property records and physical inventories required under 2 CFR 200.313
- Chain of custody
- Documented, automated chain of custody for voting equipment, evidence and priority items
- Systems of record
- ServiceNow, IBM Maximo, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Workday; REST APIs, SSO and Power BI
- Languages
- Visium supports English, Spanish and Arabic
- Deployment
- Government cloud, as used for Philadelphia’s VETS
- InThing security
- SOC 2 Type 1 report (2023), SSO and role-based access. See Security & trust
Know what you have, every day
Bring your next audit.
Start with one school, one department or one election warehouse. We’ll show what continuous accountability looks like and how it scales across a district or agency.