Physical inventory is the process of ensuring that the assets a company has listed in its production system match the assets it actually has in inventory. A company takes physical inventory by manually looking at all assets to ensure they exist as recorded, are in the appropriate locations, and consist of the recorded number of units.

A person taking physical inventory can collect physical inventory data in a number of ways, such as by writing down information about the asset manually, or by using a barcode scanner to automatically scan asset information into a file such as an Excel spreadsheet. After this information is collected, any discrepancies need to be reconciled. For example, if a computer is located in Room 549 according to your production data, but is actually in Room 346, you need to either change the record to reflect the true location of the computer, or move it to Room 549.

About Physical Inventory
The Physical Inventory feature in Oracle Assets assists you in comparing and reconciling your physical inventory data. To use the Physical Inventory feature, you must first take physical inventory of your assets. You need to include the following information about your assets:

•  A unique identifier, which can be either the asset number, tag number, or serial number
•  The location
•  The number of units

You can include other information that may make it easier for you to keep track of the assets you are comparing, such as a description of each asset, but only the information listed above is required.

You load your physical inventory data into Oracle Assets using the Physical Inventory Entries window, or you can use the Record Physical Inventory process in the Applications Desktop Integrator (ADI), which allows you to import data from an Excel spreadsheet. You can also use SQL*Loader to import physical inventory data from a non–Oracle file system.

When you finish entering physical inventory data into Oracle Assets, you run the Physical Inventory comparison program, which highlights the differences between the asset information in Oracle Assets and the actual assets in physical inventory. This program compares your physical inventory data with your Oracle Assets data for all assets that have the In Physical Inventory check box checked.

You can view the results of the comparison online in the Physical Inventory Comparison window, or by running the Physical Inventory Comparison Report. The comparison results highlight differences between the assets in your production system and those in physical inventory You can reconcile the differences between physical inventory and the information in your database by updating each asset manually, or you can use the mass additions process to add assets that are missing from the production system.

 
When you have completed your physical inventory, you can run the Missing Assets Report, which lists all assets that have not been accounted for in the physical inventory process.