Equipment / Parts Disposal
An auditable county and precinct workflow for retiring surplus, obsolete, or damaged assets — itemized records, a value-based approval chain, recorded disposition with evidence, and a signed PDF certificate.
When a government retires an asset — a worn-out truck, a pallet of obsolete computers, a box of spare parts, a seized weapon — the disposal has to be defensible: who approved it, at what value, by what method, with what evidence. This module turns that into a tracked record instead of a memo. You itemize what's leaving, the system computes the approval tier from the value at stake, routes it up the chain, captures the disposition method and its evidence, and produces a signed certificate that auditors can rely on.
What you can do
County or precinct
Create a disposal scoped to the whole county or a single precinct/department, so each office retires only what it owns.
List items & parts
Add each asset with its tag, value, and category — vehicles, IT equipment, weapons, ammunition, parts, and more — with category-specific safeguards.
Value-based approval chain
The tier is computed from the value at stake and routed up the chain — department head, then finance, then commissioners court.
Record the disposition
Choose a method — destruction, auction, sale, donation, transfer, recycle, trade-in, abandonment — and capture the required evidence.
Holds & safeguards
Place a litigation hold, flag liened vehicles or CJI assets, and require data sanitization and law-enforcement destruction certificates where the law demands them.
Signed PDF certificate
Generate a bilingual certificate of disposal — the filed record of what left, how, when, who approved it, and the full chain of custody.
The disposal lifecycle
Status changes only ever happen through the workflow — every transition is written to an append-only history, so the record is a true chain of custody.
- Draft — create the disposal and add its items. It stays editable here (and after a rejection).
- Submitted → Pending approval — on submit, the approval tier is computed and frozen from the items' value, and the record routes to the first approver.
- Approved / Rejected — each role approves in turn (a rejection returns it for revision; reopen it to a new draft round).
- Disposition path — from Approved, schedule the branch: Scheduled for destruction, Listed for auction, Transferred, Redeployed, or Disposed directly.
- Disposed / Sold / Transferred / Redeployed — record the final disposition with its method-specific evidence.
- Archived — close out a completed disposal; the certificate is filed and a 7-year retention window starts.
On hold & rejected are overlays on the path: a hold freezes the record (with the status it was held from) until released, and a rejection sends it back for revision rather than ending it.
Disposition methods
The method drives the evidence the system requires before the disposition can be recorded:
- Destruction — destruction certificate number and witness.
- Scrap / Recycle / Trade-in — recorded without extra evidence gates.
- Auction — buyer, proceeds, and a public-notice reference.
- Direct sale — buyer and proceeds.
- Donation — recipient and fair-market value.
- Transfer — receiving entity and receiving custodian.
- Abandonment — a written justification.
The three-tier approval chain
When a disposal is submitted, the system adds up the value at stake — the greater of book value or estimated fair-market value across all the items — and freezes a tier from it. Higher value means more eyes:
Department head
Lower-value disposals need a single department-head approval.
+ Finance
Mid-value disposals add a finance approval on top of the department head.
+ Commissioners court
High-value disposals add the commissioners court — and approving there requires a resolution number.
Always Tier 3, regardless of value. Some disposals are forced to the full chain because of what they contain: a weapon or ammunition, an IT asset holding criminal-justice information (CJI), a vehicle with an active lien, or anything under litigation hold. When that happens, the record shows the mandatory-Tier-3 reason in plain language.
Category safeguards & evidence
Certain categories can't leave custody until their safeguards are satisfied: IT equipment with sensitive data needs a sanitization method, who sanitized it, and when; vehicles need a VIN and title number; weapons and ammunition need a law-enforcement destruction certificate before they can be marked disposed. Beyond those required fields, you can attach evidence — photos, signed forms, scanned certificates, sale notices — to the disposal record, so the proof lives with the document.
A closer look
A precinct retires three end-of-life patrol laptops. The clerk creates a precinct-scoped disposal, adds each laptop as an IT-equipment item with its book value, and flags that they held CJI — which forces Tier 3. The department head, finance, and commissioners court each approve in turn; the court records its resolution number. The IT team records data sanitization for each unit, the disposal is scheduled for destruction with a certificate number and witness, marked disposed, and archived. The signed PDF certificate is the record the auditor asks for, and the seven-year retention clock starts automatically.
Staff:
/dashboard/equipment-disposal — the list of disposals, the create form with itemized lines, and the per-record detail with its approval progress, state history, evidence, and certificate.Works with
Fleet & GPS for the vehicles a disposal retires · Inventory / Warehouse for the stock items a disposal draws down · Equipment for the tracked gear being retired · Fund Accounting for the proceeds and write-offs a disposition records.