TL;DR
- The approval does not fail on the vendor. It fails on the baseline. Almost nobody can say what they currently spend on getting equipment to people and back, so there is nothing for the new number to be compared against.
- Your current cost is real and invisible. It sits across expense claims, courier invoices, IT hours, manager time, replacement purchases and written-off devices, and no single system holds more than a fraction of it.
- Reconstruct twelve months from five sources before you write a word of the case. The number you find will not match what anyone in the room expects, and that gap is the most persuasive thing in the document.
- Cost the do-nothing option as carefully as the purchase. A case with one priced option and one unpriced option has already told the reader which one is safe.
- Finance says no to unquantified benefit and to numbers that move between meetings. Both are avoidable and neither is about the product.
- Pricing in this category is mostly invisible, which changes how you write the case. Six vendors were checked against their own pages on 21 October 2026 and only one publishes a figure, so your own quotes are the only comparison available.
The approval that failed on arithmetic nobody had done
A people operations lead at a 240-person company spent six weeks on vendor selection. Four providers, a scoring matrix, three reference calls, a preferred option and a recommendation. The document was good. It went to the CFO and came back with one question, which was how much the company spent on this today.
Nobody knew. Not approximately, not within a factor of two. Equipment purchases sat in one cost centre, international shipping in another, the customs charges showed up as unexplained adjustments on a card statement, and the time two IT people spent chasing returns was not recorded anywhere because it was simply part of their week. The best available answer was the hardware line in the budget, which covered the laptops and nothing else that happened to them.
The request was not refused. It was deferred, which is worse, because it went back into a queue behind things that did have numbers. The real issue was not the vendor comparison. It was that six weeks had gone into choosing between options without anyone establishing what the current option costs.
Best tools for HR Operations
When you do not need to build this case at all
Four situations where the honest answer is that a platform is not the problem you have.
You are under about twenty people and everyone is in two cities. Somebody buys a laptop, somebody carries it to the new starter, and when a person leaves they bring it back. Nothing in a platform improves on that. The overhead of a vendor relationship exceeds the overhead of the thing it replaces.
Your hiring has stopped. A platform earns its cost on throughput. If you expect four new joiners this year and two leavers, there is no volume for the fixed cost to spread across. Revisit it when the hiring plan changes, not before.
You have one market and a local reseller who is good. Domestic-only companies with a working supplier relationship are paying for coordination they do not need. The cost of equipment logistics rises with the number of borders, not the number of people.
The actual pain is the policy, not the logistics. If the recurring argument at your company is who qualifies for which machine, or whether leavers get charged for damage, a platform will not settle any of it. Write the policy first. A tool that executes an undecided policy produces faster disagreement.
The five questions an approver actually asks
These are the questions that come back on a deferred case. Answer them in the document and the meeting is about the decision rather than about the gaps.
What do we spend on this today? This is the one that sinks most cases. It is not a rhetorical question and the approver usually does not know either. They are asking whether you have done the work. See the next section for the method, because guessing at this number is worse than admitting you cannot get it.
What happens if we do nothing? Doing nothing is an option with a cost, and if you have not priced it you have given the reader a free alternative. The honest answer is usually that the current cost grows with headcount while the current process does not scale, so the gap widens. Quantify the widening.
Which part of this is new money and which part is money we already spend? Finance reads a platform fee as new spend unless you show what it displaces. If the fee replaces courier accounts, storage charges and some portion of a contractor's time, say which, and say what the net is. A case that shows gross cost and net cost gets read differently from one that shows only the invoice.
What is the smallest version of this we could try? Approvers like a reversible first step, and you should want one too. If your case has no pilot in it, you are asking for a full commitment on a projection, which is a harder ask than it needs to be.
Who owns it after we buy it? An unowned tool becomes a renewal nobody defends. Name the person, name what they are accountable for, and say how much of their time this is. If the answer is that nobody has capacity, that is worth knowing before the purchase rather than after.
Reconstructing what you already spend, in five passes
This is the part that takes a week and makes the rest of the document easy. You are rebuilding twelve months of actual outflow on equipment logistics. Not the budget. What left the bank.
Pass one, hardware itself. Pull every purchase of a laptop, monitor, dock or peripheral for the last twelve months, from every channel. Company cards, reseller invoices, direct manufacturer orders and anything an employee expensed. This is the one number people usually have, and it is still usually incomplete, because peripherals are bought ad hoc and expensed.
Pass two, movement. Courier and freight invoices, broken out by direction if you can. Outbound to new joiners, inbound from leavers, and the ones that went both ways because something was wrong. International shipments will be a small fraction of the count and a large fraction of the cost, which is the first useful shape you will see.
Pass three, the border. Customs, duty, import VAT, broker fees and the charges that arrived with no explanation at all. These sit in the least organised part of the ledger because they are irregular and they arrive from parties nobody has a relationship with. Expect to spend the longest here for the fewest line items.
Pass four, storage and loss. Anything paid to hold equipment between holders, including a self-storage unit somebody expensed and forgot. Then the write-offs: devices that were never recovered, devices recovered in a state that made them unusable, and devices replaced because nobody could establish where the original was.
Pass five, time. The one everybody skips and the one that usually changes the total. Count the hours your IT or operations people spend on procurement, enrolment, chasing returns and the administration around all three. Multiply by loaded cost. Do not inflate it and do not round it up, because this is the number a sceptical reader will attack first, and a defensible small figure survives where an aggressive large one does not.
| Pass | Where it lives | Why it gets missed |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Reseller and card statements | Peripherals expensed individually, never aggregated |
| Movement | Courier accounts, freight invoices | Split across accounts opened for one-off shipments |
| Border | Card adjustments, broker invoices | Irregular, unexplained, often uncoded |
| Storage and loss | Expenses, asset write-offs | Loss is recorded as a purchase, not as a loss |
| Time | Nowhere | Not tracked, so treated as free |
Add the five. The total is your baseline and it is almost always a multiple of the hardware line that people had in mind. That multiple is the single most persuasive fact in your document, and you did not have to argue for it.
Three shapes a business case can take, and when each one works
The displacement case. You argue the platform replaces identifiable existing spend and the net cost is small or negative. This works when your baseline reconstruction found a lot of courier, customs and storage spend, and it is the easiest case to approve because it reads as consolidation rather than expansion. It fails when the displaced spend turns out to be smaller than the fee, at which point you have proven the opposite of your case in front of the person you needed to convince. Do the arithmetic before you choose this shape.
The capacity case. You argue the platform removes work that is currently consuming people you cannot replace. This works when your time pass produced a large number and when the people doing the work are visibly stretched or expensive. It is the right case for a company whose IT function is two people supporting four hundred. It fails with finance readers who treat internal time as already paid for and therefore free, which is a real position and not an unreasonable one. If you expect that reader, pair it with a displacement number so the case does not rest on time alone.
The risk case. You argue that the current process produces outcomes the company cannot accept: devices unaccounted for, data on machines nobody can locate, evidence you cannot produce for an audit. This is the strongest case in a regulated setting or ahead of a certification, and the weakest in a company that has not yet been hurt. Risk cases are approved after incidents and deferred before them, which is frustrating and predictable, so if you are writing one, find the near-miss in your own history and lead with it.
Most real cases are a displacement case with a capacity section. The risk case is usually a paragraph rather than a document, unless something has already gone wrong.
The displacement sum, worked
Every article on this subject tells you to show the net rather than the gross and then stops. Here is the arithmetic, with the shape of the calculation rather than numbers you should borrow.
The inputs below are illustrative and they are not research. They are the slots you fill from your own five passes. A reader who copies these figures into their own document has made exactly the mistake this article is about.
Take a company of 300 people with 60 joiners and 45 leavers in the year, operating in six countries. Fill the left column from your own reconstruction.
| Line | Where the figure comes from | Illustrative | Displaced by a platform? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware purchases | Pass one | 168,000 | No. You still buy the machines |
| Outbound shipping | Pass two | 14,200 | Mostly. Usually folded into the service |
| Inbound retrieval | Pass two | 9,800 | Mostly, and this is where the rate changes |
| Customs, duty, broker fees | Pass three | 7,400 | Partly. Still payable, better handled |
| Storage between holders | Pass four | 3,600 | Yes, if the vendor warehouses |
| Unrecovered devices | Pass four | 11,000 | Partly, and the argument is about how much |
| Internal time | Pass five | 22,000 | Partly. Never entirely |
The gross is the sum of the column. The number that matters is the second column from the right, and the number that decides the case is the one on the far right, which is a judgement you have to make line by line and defend.
Three rules make that judgement survive scrutiny. Never claim a line is fully displaced unless the vendor contract says so in writing, because a reader who checks will find the exception and then distrust the rest. Discount the unrecovered-device line hard, because recovery rates improve rather than reach a hundred per cent, and a case that assumes zero loss is a case nobody believes. Treat internal time as partly displaced at most, since somebody still manages the vendor, approves the orders and handles the exceptions, and the honest claim is a reduction rather than an elimination.
Then subtract the platform fee from the displaced total. If the result is positive you have a displacement case and you should lead with it. If it is negative you have a capacity or risk case and you should say so rather than stretching the displacement numbers until they fit, which is the single most common way these documents lose their credibility in the room.
What goes in the specification, and why it decides everything
The article above says to send an identical specification to every vendor. Here is what it has to contain, because a specification that omits any of these will come back as quotes you cannot put side by side.
Headcount by country, including the countries with one person. Those single-person markets are where quotes diverge most and where vendors most often assume you meant somewhere easier. A list of six countries with totals is not the same instrument as a list of six countries with counts.
Last year's real joiners and leavers. This drives cost more than headcount does. A stable 300-person company and a 300-person company with thirty per cent turnover are completely different customers generating completely different volumes of shipment and collection.
The device standard as a specification, not a model. Processor class, memory, storage, screen size and operating system. Naming one specific machine produces a quote anchored to something that will be out of stock within months.
Your replacement expectation as a working-day target you would accept, per country tier rather than globally. Stating what you want gets a sales answer. Stating what you would accept gets a real conversation about which markets they can actually meet it in.
What happens on a failed collection, in their words. Ask them to describe the process and the charge rather than confirming that they handle it. The difference between vendors in this category is concentrated almost entirely in what happens when something goes wrong, and a yes or no question cannot surface it.
Whether the fee is per device, per movement, per seat or a subscription. You cannot normalise quotes without knowing the unit, and the units genuinely differ across this category. Ask for the unit explicitly and ask what sits outside it.
Send that, then take the calls. The first conversation will start from your numbers rather than from their deck, which shortens the whole process by weeks and produces quotes you can actually compare.
Pricing the time pass without overclaiming
The time figure is the one a sceptical reader attacks first, so it is worth getting defensible rather than large.
Do not use salary. Use loaded cost, which is salary plus employer contributions plus the benefits and overhead the company actually pays, and your finance team already has a figure for it because they use it for hiring approvals. Ask for theirs rather than constructing your own, because a number finance supplied is a number finance will not argue with.
Then count hours conservatively and from evidence. The best source is usually a ticket queue or a shared inbox, where you can count how many equipment requests arrived last quarter and sample how long a representative handful took end to end. Failing that, ask the two or three people who do the work to estimate their own weekly hours and take the lowest estimate rather than the average. You are not trying to maximise this number, you are trying to produce one that survives a challenge.
Finally, state what it means. Internal time is not cash and a finance reader is right to treat it differently from an invoice. The honest framing is that the hours are already paid for and the question is what they are spent on, which turns the claim from a saving into a capacity argument. That is a weaker financial claim and a stronger operational one, and in most companies the operational one is what actually gets the approval.
Five questions to ask yourself before you write anything
How many borders does a typical device cross in its life? If the answer is zero, your case is weak and you should know that early. The cost of this problem is a function of distance and customs, not of headcount, and a domestic company has a cheaper version of it than the numbers in any vendor's material assume.
What is your actual annual churn, not your headcount? Joiners plus leavers is the throughput that a platform is priced against and justified by. A stable 300-person company with eight per cent turnover is a different buyer from a 300-person company that hired 120 and lost 95, even though the headline number matches.
Can you produce a list of every company device and its holder today? If you can, and it is right, your asset problem is smaller than you think and the case has to rest on logistics rather than on tracking. If you cannot, say so plainly in the document, because an approver who learns it in the meeting hears it as something you concealed.
Who has refused this before, and on what grounds? Most equipment platform cases are not the first attempt. Find the earlier one, find the objection that killed it, and address that objection in the first page rather than the eighth. If the earlier objection was price, your baseline work answers it. If it was ownership, your named owner answers it.
What would have to be true in a year for this to have been wrong? Write that down before you submit. It is the question a good approver asks, and having the answer ready signals that you have considered the downside rather than only the pitch. It also gives you the review criteria for the renewal.
The pricing problem, and why it shapes your document
In most software purchases you shortlist from a pricing page, arrive at a demo knowing the approximate number, and spend the conversation on fit. This category does not work that way, and it changes what your business case can contain.
Six vendors in the equipment logistics space were read from their own pages on 21 October 2026. Firstbase, GroWrk, allwhere, Esevel, Workwize and Deel's IT product publish no price at all between them. Every route is a contact form or an invitation to a conversation. This is not evasiveness peculiar to these companies. Cost genuinely depends on country mix, device volume and which jobs you want covered, and those vary enough that a published tier would mislead most readers.
One exception exists and it is our own product, which is a fact worth stating plainly rather than burying. RemoAsset publishes a Subscription tier that starts at $1,499 a year for companies between 50 and 5,000 employees, alongside a pay-as-you-go tier with no published figure for smaller teams. We publish this site, so treat that as disclosure rather than as a recommendation. What matters for your document is the structural point: in a set where almost nothing is published, a single published number is a reference point and not a verdict, because it covers a particular shape of engagement and your shape may differ.
Three consequences follow for the case you are writing.
You cannot benchmark externally. There is no public reference to cite, so the only comparison available is between your own quotes. That makes an identical specification the entire basis of the decision rather than good practice, and it is the reason the specification work has to happen before the quotes rather than after.
Your baseline carries more weight than usual. When you cannot show that a price is competitive, the remaining argument is that it is worth it. That argument is made entirely out of your own current spend, which is why the five passes above are not preliminary work. They are the case.
Shortlisting happens after the first call, not before it. Budget accordingly. You will spend hours on vendors you were never going to pick, and the only way to shorten that is to send the specification before the conversation so the first call starts from your numbers.
The options, and where each one struggles
Six options, described honestly, including ours. None of these publishes a price except the last, so what follows is about shape rather than cost.
Firstbase is the most established name in the category and sells a full lifecycle service with its own inventory. It suits companies that want one party accountable end to end and are comfortable with a managed relationship. Where it struggles is flexibility at the small end, where the service model is heavier than a thirty-person company usually needs.
GroWrk leads on country coverage and on the depth of its in-country operations. It suits companies hiring into markets where a courier alone is not enough. Where it struggles is that its own pricing page runs a comparison estimator showing annual costs for rivals, which is marketing rather than published pricing, and a buyer who mistakes it for a source will build a spreadsheet on numbers no vendor has confirmed.
allwhere positions around consultation and a tailored arrangement rather than a product you configure yourself. That suits companies with an unusual mix who want somebody to design the process. It struggles where you want to self-serve, because the model assumes a conversation at each step.
Esevel is strongest in Asia-Pacific, with real operational depth in markets that other vendors cover by partner. It suits a company whose hiring is weighted there. It struggles as a single global vendor if most of your people are in Europe and the Americas, where you are paying for a specialism that is not where your problem is.
Deel IT is equipment bundled with an employment and payroll platform. It suits companies already using Deel for hiring who want one vendor and one invoice. It struggles when you want the equipment function to outlive the employment relationship, because unbundling later is a migration rather than a cancellation.
RemoAsset is our own product, which is the disclosure and not a footnote. It covers procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries, publishes a Subscription tier from $1,499 a year, and includes MDM and HRMS integration at that tier. Three limits are worth stating because a business case built on the wrong assumption is a bad business case: it enrols devices but is not an MDM in its own right, so if you need full endpoint management you still need one; it wipes devices but is not a certified ITAD, so a formal disposal certificate is a separate arrangement; and coverage and lead times vary by market, so the countries in your plan matter more than the headline number of countries supported.
The decision table
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary Pain | Recommended Starting Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One country, stable headcount | Under 50 | Local reseller, manual tracking | Nothing is actually broken | Do not build the case. Revisit on a hiring plan change |
| Hiring into two or three new markets | 50 to 150 | Courier accounts, spreadsheet register | Customs surprises and delivery dates you cannot promise | Displacement case built on the border pass |
| Distributed, high churn | 150 to 500 | Mixed vendors, partial register | Retrieval failures and devices nobody can locate | Displacement plus capacity, with a named owner |
| Small IT team supporting a large population | 200 to 600 | Working process, exhausted people | Equipment work crowding out everything else | Capacity case, paired with one displacement number |
| Ahead of a certification or audit | Any | Register exists but cannot be evidenced | Cannot produce chain of custody on demand | Risk case, led by your own near-miss |
| Already on a bundled HR platform | 100 to 1,000 | Equipment bundled with employment | Cannot change one part without the other | Cost the unbundling before you cost the alternative |
What getting this wrong actually costs
The visible failure is that the case is refused and you keep the current process. That is not the expensive outcome, because the current process at least works at today's volume.
The expensive outcome is approval on numbers that do not hold. A case built on an optimistic baseline gets signed, the saving does not appear, and at renewal somebody asks what happened. You then have to defend a tool that is probably doing its job against an expectation it was never going to meet, and the usual result is that it gets cancelled and the company goes back to a process it had already outgrown. The second attempt is much harder than the first, because the institutional memory is that this was tried and did not work.
The other expensive outcome is approval that arrives too late. Equipment problems compound quietly. The register drifts, the leaver backlog grows, and the point at which somebody finally builds the case is usually the point at which the cleanup is a project in its own right. Six months of deferral turns a purchase into a purchase plus a reconciliation.
So the question to hold onto is not whether you can get this approved. It is whether the number you are putting in front of somebody is one you will still stand behind in twelve months when they come back to it.
What the case has to say about the pilot
Running a pilot well is its own subject. What matters here is narrower: what the business case document has to contain about it, because a pilot described vaguely reads as a delay rather than as a de-risking step.
A scope that is a subset, not a sample. Pick a real slice that exercises the hard part. One country you find difficult plus one you find easy, or one quarter's joiners in a region, is a pilot. A handful of shipments chosen for convenience is a demonstration, and approvers can tell the difference.
An end date in the document. Not a duration, a date. Durations drift because nothing forces the conversation, whereas a date on a page creates a meeting. Sixty days is the usual shape for this category because it is long enough to include both an onboarding cycle and at least one retrieval.
A decision criterion written before the pilot starts. This is the part people skip and it is the part that makes the pilot worth doing. Name two or three things that must be true at the end, in terms you could check with a spreadsheet rather than a conversation. Delivery inside your stated working-day target in the difficult country. A collection completed without you chasing it. An asset register you could hand to somebody else and have them understand.
What happens if it fails. Say it explicitly, including who decides and what the company has spent that it does not get back. An approver reading a pilot with a stated exit is being asked for a much smaller commitment than one reading a pilot with an implied one, and the difference in how it lands is larger than the difference in what you are actually asking for.
Who is doing the work. A pilot run by whoever has a spare afternoon produces a result nobody trusts. Name the person, say roughly how much of their time it takes, and have them confirm they have it before the document goes anywhere. An unstaffed pilot runs late, and a late pilot tends to be concluded by exhaustion rather than by evidence.
One warning on sequencing. Do not run the pilot before you have reconstructed your baseline, because without the baseline you have nothing to compare the pilot against and you will end up assessing it on impressions. The order is baseline, specification, quotes, pilot, decision. Companies that reverse the first and fourth steps usually end up buying the vendor whose onboarding felt nicest, which is a real signal about the vendor and a poor basis for a six-figure commitment.
When the spreadsheet stops being enough
Most companies run equipment on a spreadsheet for longer than they should, and that is usually the correct decision while it holds. The spreadsheet is free, everybody can read it, and at low volume it is accurate because one person remembers everything that is in it.
It stops being enough at a specific and recognisable moment, which is when the person who remembers leaves, or goes on holiday during an onboarding week. The sheet is suddenly the only record and the only record turns out to be a list of names with no dates, no serial numbers for about a third of the fleet, and no indication of which of the entries were reconciled against anything real. That is not a tooling failure. It is a single-owner failure that the tooling was hiding.
If you recognise that moment in your own company, the business case writes itself differently. You are not asking for a cost saving. You are asking to stop depending on one person's memory for a record that the company needs to be able to produce without them. That is a legitimate argument and finance readers understand it, but only if you say it in those words rather than dressing it as efficiency.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build a credible business case for this?
Budget about a week of real work, most of which is the baseline reconstruction rather than the writing. The five passes over your own spend take two to four days depending on how organised your finance system is and how many channels people have bought equipment through. The document itself is a day. The remaining time goes on getting quotes, which is the part you do not control, because every vendor in this category requires a conversation before producing a number and those conversations have to be scheduled.
What if I genuinely cannot get the current spend figure?
Say so explicitly in the document rather than estimating. An approver can work with a stated gap and will be suspicious of a number that appears without a source. Give the figures you can evidence, name the categories you could not reconstruct, and say what it would take to get them. In practice the border and time passes are the ones that defeat people, and a case that presents hardware, movement and storage accurately while flagging the other two as unquantified is more credible than one that guesses at all five.
Should the pilot be in the business case or a separate approval?
Put it in the same document as the first phase of the request. Splitting it into a separate approval doubles the number of meetings and invites the question of why you are asking twice. Frame the pilot as the thing that produces the evidence for the full commitment, give it an end date and a decision criterion, and make clear what happens if it fails. An approver reading a case with a real exit is being asked for a smaller thing than one reading a case without.
How do I handle the fact that vendors will not publish prices?
State it as a finding rather than apologising for it. Your document should say that this category does not publish, name the vendors you checked and the date you checked them, and explain that the comparison therefore rests on an identical specification sent to each. That turns an obvious weakness in the case into evidence that you ran the process properly. It also pre-empts the question of why there is no benchmark, which an approver will otherwise ask.
Who should own the equipment platform once it is bought?
Whoever currently absorbs the pain, which is usually IT operations in a company with an IT function and people operations in a company without one. The important thing is that the owner is named in the case and has the time allocated, not which function they sit in. Equipment work has a tendency to be everybody's secondary priority, and a tool with no named owner becomes a subscription that renews without anybody being able to say what it delivered last year.
Does the case change if we are already using an employment platform that offers equipment?
Yes, and the change is that you have to cost the unbundling as well as the alternative. A bundled arrangement is cheaper to keep than to leave, because leaving means separating a function that is currently invoiced and administered as one thing. Your case needs a section on what it takes to move, what stays with the incumbent, and what happens to devices already in the field under the existing arrangement. Without that section an approver will reasonably assume you have not thought about it.
What is the most common reason these cases get rejected?
An unquantified benefit sitting next to a precise cost. The platform fee is exact, the saving is described in adjectives, and the reader has no way to compare them. The fix is not to invent a saving but to narrow the claim until it is something you can evidence, even if that makes it smaller. A case that claims one defensible number beats a case that claims three aspirational ones, because the reader can check the first and has to take the others on trust.
Should I include the risk of devices going missing in the financial case?
Only if you have your own numbers for it, which means the loss figures from your storage and loss pass. Industry figures for device loss are unreliable and vary enormously by company shape, and quoting one invites an argument about whether it applies to you. Your own write-offs over twelve months are harder to dismiss and usually more persuasive, because they describe your company rather than an average. If your own number is small, leave the risk argument out of the financial case and make it separately on its own terms.
Where this leaves you
The business case is not a document about a vendor. It is a document about your own operation, and the vendor appears in the last third of it.
Spend the week on the baseline. Cost the do-nothing option as carefully as the purchase. Pick one of the three shapes rather than attempting all three at once, name the owner, and build in a pilot with a real exit. Then send an identical specification to three or four vendors, because in a category where almost nobody publishes a price, the specification is the only instrument you have for making the quotes comparable.
One last thing about the document itself. Keep it to three pages with the baseline table on the first one, and write it for somebody who will read the first page carefully and skim the rest. The people who approve this are not reading for the vendor comparison, which they will take on trust because it is your job rather than theirs. They are reading for whether you know what the company currently spends and whether the number you are asking for is smaller than that. Put both of those on page one and the rest of the document becomes supporting evidence rather than an argument you have to win.
