Why You Should Record Your Equipment’s Serial Numbers
December 19, 2017
In this video
No doubt, all of us involved in lawn care, grounds maintenance and arbor businesses take care of our equipment. We go to great lengths to do that. We'll buy the top of the line oil for our two strokes, we take out insurance to protect our belongings in the event of some catastrophe. We make sure we have a safe place to store them. When we use them, we don't abuse them unnecessarily. Sometimes you have to to get the job done.
Here's one thing you may not have thought of though that goes along with protecting your equipment and that's recording the serial numbers. This is a very small thing but it's one that is easy to forget to do. In the excitement of getting a brand new piece of equipment, you rip open the box, you probably toss the user manual over in the corner and you just fire it up and get to using it. But it's important to take a quick beat and record that serial number.
Record it, I think I can keep track of a couple of string trimmers up here. Isn't that enough? Well, maybe not so much. In the event of a theft, serial numbers may help recover your items if the thief has sold them to a pawn shop. If they pop up for resale somewhere else, police can also check those items against those serial numbers that you gave them, proving that you're the rightful owner.
Recording those serial numbers can be an extra step of verifying ownership in the event some catastrophe, whether it's fire, earthquake, tornado, whatever natural disaster your portion of the world might offer, it's another means of verifying ownership for your insurance claim. Probably one of the more relevant reasons to go ahead and record that serial number is when you register your warranty, you're almost guaranteed to need it. But, not just typing it in the warranty information, sending it off and then forgetting about it, you need to record that serial number yourself in the unlikely event that that manufacturer is ever unwilling or unable to give that information back to you.
It can be as simple as writing it down on the owner's manual that came with your equipment. You can go a step further by safely logging that information in online. Or you can just bypass writing altogether and just snap some pictures of the serial number that you upload to the cloud.
It just takes a couple of minutes, go record those serial numbers and then get back out to running your business.