Section 3.5: Equipment & Resource Management

Resources in the sidebar is where your organization keeps its physical kit: camera packages, lighting, audio and grip gear, vehicles, studios and locations. It has six tabs: Inventory, Kits, Calendar, Packing, Hours log and Analytics. On Studio and above, an Inspections tab joins them when gear needs a look (see Section 6).

Kits, Calendar and Hours log carry a strip at the top that counts your items: Total, Available, On job, Reserved and Out of service. Hours log is a read-only list of the hours your bookings add up to, one row per booking, with Export CSV. Analytics shows Booked hours, Utilization, Est. cost and Items out now, with views by Items, Types and Projects.

On a single project, gear is handled in Resources, Equipment. See Section 3.10: Packing and Needed vs Booked.

Resources come in three parts on the plan ladder:

If Resources does not appear in your sidebar, your plan or your role does not include it. Talk to your organization owner about your plan or your access.

1. Inventory

The Inventory tab lists everything your organization owns.

Add items

• Click Add for a quick-add row. Type in Resource name and ABRAM suggests matches from a catalog of common equipment as you type.
• Click Import to bring in many items at once from a CSV, TSV or text file, or paste rows straight from a spreadsheet. The first row holds the column names, and the import window shows the columns it expects. Only the name is required.
  • Type takes any of the 15 types by name: Equipment, Camera, Lighting, Audio, Grip, Electrical, Vehicle, Wardrobe, Props, Set Dec, Special FX, Location, Studio, Expendable or Other. A blank type imports as Equipment.
  • Condition takes Operational, Maintenance, Needs repair or Retired, and the words spreadsheets often use: new, excellent, good, fair, ok and working import as Operational, service and servicing as Maintenance, and repair, broken and damaged as Needs repair.
  • The Preview checks every row before anything is saved. A row with no name, or a type or condition ABRAM does not know, shows the problem in its Result column and is left out, and the import button counts only the rows that will come in.

On Pro, a meter shows how many of your 80 items you have used. At the limit, Add is replaced by an upgrade prompt.

The inventory table

Each item shows its Asset ID, Name, Status, Booked, Logistics, Condition, Type, Location, Serial #, Util %, Qty and Rate ($). Util % shows how booked the item is over the Utilization window, which you can change. Search with Search name, serial, asset ID and filter by Status, Condition, Type and Location.

Condition is Operational, Maintenance, Needs repair or Retired.

Edit many items at once

Tick the items you want, then click Edit (it shows how many you picked). You can change status, condition, location and rates in one go.

Item pages

Opening an item takes you to its own page, with Overview, Bookings, Units and Maintenance tabs. All resources takes you back to the list. An item can have its own Point of contact, who takes its repairs and inspections when equipment logistics are on.

Individual units

Identical items can be tracked as a quantity or as individual units. Open the Units tab and click Add unit to give a piece its own label, serial number, tag, condition and status. Ten matching lights can be ten tracked units, and you can add as many units as the item's quantity. Booking still works on the quantity.

Maintenance history

An item keeps a running record of servicing, damage and repairs, so its state today reads alongside how it got there. On the Maintenance tab, click Log an issue to record a repair, damage, a loss, an inspection or a service. An entry can apply to the whole item or to a single unit, and repair, damage and lost entries take it out of service until they are closed. Owners, admins and people who manage resources can log any type. Everyone else can report damage or an inspection, and the item stays available until one of them confirms it. An inspection never takes an item out of service. When your organization runs routine inspections, the Maintenance tab also shows Inspection due, or the date of the next one.

Barcode scanning

On SMB / Enterprise, Batch allocate in the More actions menu lets you scan barcodes to find items and book several to a project at once. On other plans the Batch allocate button is locked.

2. Kits

The Kits tab bundles items you always send out together, such as an interview camera package, so you can book the whole set in one step.

1. Open Kits and click New kit. ABRAM creates the kit and opens it.
2. Give it a Name, Category, Daily rate and Description, then add items from your inventory under Items with Search equipment to add. Set a quantity for each.
3. Click Save.

Build with AI reads your inventory and suggests kits. Describe the kits you want, click Generate suggestions, choose the ones to keep and create them. It counts toward your AI usage.

Add a kit to a work order and ABRAM books every item in it for that work order's dates.

3. Calendar

The Calendar tab shows every booking of every item across your projects. It opens on a Week view, with your items down the side and days across the top. Switch to Month for a grid of days. In the week view your locations show as folders, and dragging an item into one moves it to that location.

Filter the calendar by Type, Status, Condition and Location, and switch Show kits on or off.

4. Packing

The Packing tab lists every work order that has gear booked, under Coming up and Earlier, so you can see which pack lists are due next. Each work order has one pack list. Click a row to open it. The same pack list opens from the project's Resources, Equipment tab. See Section 3.10.

5. Availability and conflicts

• Status comes from bookings. Whether an item reads as available, reserved or on a job is worked out from what is booked against it. You can still override it by hand with Status override on the item's page, set to Maintenance, In transit or Blocked, when something needs holding back.
• You cannot book more than you own on a work order. If a booking would take an item past the quantity you own on those dates, ABRAM stops the save and names the item that is short. From a project's Equipment tab you can choose Request anyway, which holds the item as requested.
• Logistics rules can refuse a booking too. On Studio and above, a booking inside another booking's transit buffer, or of gear that needs repair, is refused with a message that names the rule. See Section 6.

6. Equipment logistics

On Studio and above, owners and admins set the rules your gear follows on every booking under Settings > Workspace > General > Equipment logistics. Each setting saves the moment you change it. On other plans the block shows an upgrade prompt.

Transit buffer

A booking that lands inside another booking's buffer is refused, and the message says why: "[Resource name]" is in transit for another booking, with the number of days your organization keeps between bookings. Buffer days show the item as In transit in the inventory and do not count toward Util %.

Repair lockout

With Block gear that needs repair on, an item whose condition is Needs repair or Retired cannot be booked, and each unit in that condition takes one off the quantity you can book. The refusal says the item needs repair and, when some units are still fine, how many can be booked until it is fixed. Work order pickers keep listing the item, greyed out and marked Needs repair.

Inspections

Inspect gear when it comes back opens one inspection when a pack list line is ticked Returned or a shipment comes back. Routine inspections count from an item's last closed inspection, or from the day it was added. Neither stops the gear being booked.

Gear that needs a look gathers on the Inspections tab under Resources, which owners, admins and people who manage resources see whenever there is something on it. Each row shows the item, the reason (Back from a job, Overdue by a number of days, or Due every a number of days) and its contact. Click Done to close an inspection, or to record one done now for an item that was due, which restarts its clock. Items due for a routine inspection are also marked Inspection due in the inventory.

Contacts

ABRAM picks the contact for an item in order: the item's own Point of contact, then the contact for its type, then the default Contact. Only active members of your organization count. The contact is assigned new repairs, damage and loss reports and inspections on the item, and gets a notification that the item needs a look, which opens the Inspections tab. Nobody is notified about a report they made themselves.