Understanding Parent and Component Relationships

You can set up parent and component relationships to group individual assets or pieces of equipment. For example, when you create master records, you can identify a computer as a parent item. You can identify the monitor, keyboard, and mouse as components of the computer. Those components, in turn, might be the parents of still other components, and so on.

Parent assets can be physical assets or pseudo assets. You can set up pseudo assets to group assets under a parent that does not directly incur costs or generate revenue. For example, you might set up departments as parent pseudo assets. Each department might have a certain number of cubicles as component assets. Each cubicle might be the pseudo parent of real assets, such as computers, telephones, and so on.

You can establish up to 25 hierarchical levels of a parent item. The system assigns a number to each component according to its level in the hierarchy, which is particularly useful for tracking complex assets.

This graphic illustrates a typical relationship between parent and component equipment: