We moved our tech loans to CHEQROOM — here are our thoughts

We’ve recently moved our technology loans to CHEQROOM and are enjoying the experience. Here’s what we like and here’s what could be better. We have the 500 item plan and our school has a total of 3000 devices and accessories in circulation with students and staff that would be great to have in the paid plan eventually.

What we like:

We’ve recently moved our technology borrowing system to CHEQROOM and are enjoying the experience.

• Compared to the competition (snipe IT, AssetTiger, WASP barcode) it looks and feels FAR more intuitive.
• We were using Airtable and it was very easy to make a mistake / not validate the loans. CHEQROOM has a good process for loaning and returing ensuring that data is not lost and mis-entered.
• Automated email notifications and they are fast and reliable!
• Handles a large number of assets
• API exists (not the best thing in the world to work with)
• Understand the education / library setting
• Not trying to do all things (some platforms to financials, consumables etc) CHEQROOM focuses on loans and ownership of devices with better results
• Commenting feature and history of check-outs users and devices. Every action is recorded -Amazing!

What could be better:

• Pricing for lots of items is very expensive. Doesn’t encourage us to use it beyond loans eg: for Lab PC’s etc
• Development appears to be slow (according to their Trello board)
• Support have been prompt but ineffective. Each issue was not fixed after being told it was requiring further follow-up. Not good when an issue is effecting all users and we can’t loan.
• Reports are next to useless — way to rigid and limiting
• Filtering is not flexible enough

Feature Requests (in order of importance):

1. Ability to sort & filter by Custom Fields (ie. Sort by Contact Year Level from the Check-outs view)
   Currently we can’t sort or filter using our custom fields. An example use case is we have year 12’s leaving and need to follow up all overdues that are Year12 students (defined in custom field). To do this now is manual and very clunky any improvements here would be ace!
2. Conditionals for notifications
   Be able to only send an overdue email to a specific group of users or for specific types of devices. Eg: Sending staff a different email to students for overdues.
3. Better filtering
   Our Principal needs to follow up students that are more than 10 days overdue (as an example) and currently there is no clear list for him to follow up and comment on.
4. Auditing Available loans
   Having the ability to mark a device as found against a list of available loans. For example we want to see what devices are available in the loans cabinet and compare that to what is listed as available in Cheqroom. (We used to tick a box in Airtable as found then follow up the discrepancies)
5. Email gateway
   We want students to be able to reply (maybe as a comment) and our team to be able to reply back to them from Cheqroom (single platform)
6. Oauth / SAML
   We’d love a sign in with Google button for our G Suite domain!
7. Customizable due-date presets (1 day, 2 day etc)
   We would like to be able to setup thee “suggested” due dates and also set a default due date (eg: 24hours) that is prefilled on a device.
8. Less clicks!
   Quick check-out takes a fair few clicks. Every library staff member noted this and I don’t blame them it’s not super optimised. To complete a checkout without visiting checkout screen would be ideal. Add the due date field to the quick checkout would be close.
9. Generic Items
   Sometimes we want to loan something generic (like a USB cable) rather than assigning a serial to each item we’d like to just check out this device “type” to know a user has one. Snipe IT do this with “Accessories” checkout their demo here: https://demo.snipeitapp.com/accessories
10. Repairs
    In order to move our Chromebook fleet of 2500 devices we’d need the ability to open repairs and track the progress of these repairs. Ideally we’d be able to create a login for our repair company to update and statuses for the repairs like: With Vendor, Awaiting parts, Ready to collect & a state for back with user, etc. The big reason we want this in the loans platform (CHEQROOM) is when we do a repair the first thing they need is a loan and that loan needs an arbitrary due date. This causes us headaches when repairs go over the due date the student doesn’t understand and sometimes hands their device back etc. We need a way to link the “ready to collect” of a repair to set the loan to be due that day.
11. Quick user switching
    This is a bit left of field, but a solution for the 3 librarians to be able to quickly switch between users as they share the check-out PC.

If you use something good for loans, let me know!