TL;DR
- Moving a person is an HR process with a playbook. Moving their equipment is usually nobody's process, which is why it surfaces two weeks before the flight as an unanswered question.
- The laptop in their bag is an export from one country and an import into another. That is true whether or not anybody treats it that way, and treating it informally is where the problems start.
- Replacing the device at the destination is frequently cheaper than moving it, and almost nobody runs that comparison because moving feels like the default.
- The asset register is wrong the moment they land. Country, and often the whole holding arrangement, changes, and nothing updates it unless somebody makes that a step.
- Personal luggage is the most common route and the least considered. Ask what happens if the bag is lost or the device is examined, before rather than after.
- Build the equipment question into the relocation checklist at the point the move is agreed, not at the point the dates are booked.
The move that was planned for four months and the laptop that was planned for none
A senior engineer at a 300-person company moved from Berlin to Toronto. The company handled it properly: immigration support started in January, a relocation allowance was agreed, the Canadian entity was ready, payroll was sorted and the start date in the new location was confirmed six weeks out.
Ten days before the flight somebody asked what was happening with the laptop.
Nobody had a view. IT assumed it travelled with him. Finance had not been asked. The asset register listed the machine against Germany, which would stop being true on a Tuesday. He asked whether he should pack it or whether something was being arranged, and the honest answer was that nobody knew.
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What happened was the common thing: it went in his hand luggage, arrived fine, and the register said Germany for another fourteen months. That worked. It also meant the company had no idea where roughly a dozen machines were, because the same thing had happened a dozen times.
When this genuinely is not a problem
The move is domestic. Somebody relocating within one country takes their equipment and updates an address. There is no border, no customs question and nothing in this article applies.
The device is personally owned under a stipend arrangement. If your model is that people buy their own equipment with a company contribution, the machine is theirs and it moves as their property. That is one of the real advantages of a stipend model and it is worth noting when comparing approaches.
They are moving within a trading bloc with no practical border friction for personal goods. Some moves genuinely are administrative non-events. The thing to avoid is assuming yours is one without checking, because the assumption holds right up until it does not.
The relocation is short-term and the person is returning. A six-month assignment where somebody keeps their home base is a different arrangement, closer to extended travel than to relocation, and usually the equipment simply travels with them both ways.
The five questions nobody owns
Each of these has an obvious owner in theory and no owner in practice, which is why they surface late.
Does the equipment move or get replaced? This is a decision and it is almost never made deliberately. The default is that it moves, because moving requires nobody to do anything. See the comparison below, because the default is frequently the more expensive option.
Who is the importer? When a company laptop crosses a border, somebody is importing it. If it goes in an employee's suitcase, that is them, personally, whether or not anybody framed it that way. If it ships, it is usually the company or its agent. Those are different situations and they carry different consequences.
Who pays if there is a charge? Duty, import tax, a broker fee or a holding charge. The employee is unlikely to expect to pay and equally unlikely to have been told they will not. Decide before, because deciding after means deciding under pressure with somebody who has just moved countries.
What updates the register? Country changes, the support arrangement may change, warranty terms may differ, and the eventual retrieval route is now completely different. Nothing updates unless somebody makes it a step in the relocation checklist.
What happens to the old market's arrangement? If the person was the only employee in that country and you held a local arrangement for them, their departure may end it. Worth knowing before it lapses rather than after.
Move it or replace it, with the arithmetic
This is the comparison that is almost never run, and it frequently favours replacement.
| Factor | Moving the device | Replacing at destination |
|---|---|---|
| Direct cost | Shipping plus duty plus any broker fee | Cost of a new machine, less residual value of the old |
| Downtime | Days in transit, longer if held | Usually none if ordered ahead of arrival |
| Risk | Loss, damage, customs hold, examination | Supply availability in the destination market |
| Warranty and support | May not transfer or may be awkward to claim | Local warranty, local support, clean |
| Register impact | One device, changed country, changed arrangement | Clean retirement and clean issue |
| Residual value | Retained but now in a market where it may be harder to sell | Old device recovered and resold or redeployed where it already sits |
The thing that tips it most often is warranty and support. A three-year-old machine with eighteen months left on a warranty that does not travel is a machine you will be supporting internationally for eighteen months, and the first time it needs a repair the cost of that decision becomes visible all at once.
The thing that tips it the other way is a specialist configuration or a market where the device is hard to source. If the person has an unusual machine, or they are moving somewhere supply is genuinely constrained, moving it is the right answer and the comparison just confirmed that.
Run it anyway. It takes twenty minutes and it stops the default being the decision.
If it moves in a suitcase, which is usually what happens
Most relocated equipment travels as personal luggage and that is not inherently wrong. It is wrong when nobody has thought about it.
Three things to settle in advance.
Say explicitly that it is company property and give them something that says so. A short letter naming the device, the serial number and the company, confirming it belongs to the company and is being transported for business use. Whether anybody asks for it varies enormously, and producing it when asked is much better than improvising.
Decide what happens if the bag is lost. Airlines lose luggage and a laptop in a lost bag is a company asset gone, plus whatever was on it. Decide whether it goes in hand luggage as a rule, and decide who absorbs the loss if it does not come back.
Make sure the device is in a state you are comfortable with at a border. Encrypted, with the company's normal controls applied. This is not about expecting a problem; it is that a device crossing a border should be in the state your security policy says, and relocation is exactly when people stop thinking about that.
Do not give the employee a lecture about customs law. Give them a letter, a decision about hand luggage and a named person to call if something happens at the airport.
If it ships, what to establish first
Shipping is cleaner on paper and has more moving parts in practice.
Establish who the importer of record is, because that determines who deals with any charge and who is responsible if something is wrong with the paperwork. For a company with no entity in the destination, this is a more complicated question than it looks and it is the reason specialist vendors exist.
Establish what the device is worth for declaration purposes and how that is determined. A three-year-old laptop declared at its purchase price attracts charges on a value it no longer has, and declaring it too low creates a different problem.
Establish the timeline honestly, including the possibility of a hold. Then plan the person's first week on the assumption that the device might not be there, because a new starter in a new country without a working machine is a bad first week and an avoidable one.
And establish who the person contacts when it has not arrived, which should be a name rather than a shared inbox.
The gap week, and what to do about it
Whatever route you pick, there is usually a period where the person is between devices or between countries. That gap is where the practical damage happens.
The cheapest fix is a loaner at the destination, if you have any local presence or a vendor who can provide one. A machine waiting when they land removes the entire problem and costs a fraction of the disruption it prevents.
The second cheapest is sequencing: send the replacement ahead so it arrives before they do, and have them carry the old one for the overlap. That gives a clean handover with no gap and makes the old device's recovery straightforward, since it is in their hands rather than in transit.
The worst arrangement, and the common one, is that the device ships on the day they fly and both are in transit simultaneously with nobody holding anything. That is how a week disappears.
What to tell the employee, and when
The equipment conversation lands in the middle of a person's most stressful quarter, and how it is handled affects how the whole relocation feels to them. Most companies get this wrong by saying nothing until it is urgent.
At the point the move is agreed, say that equipment is handled and name who owns it. One sentence. They do not need the detail yet, they need to know it is not a thing they have to solve. Relocating employees carry a long mental list of unresolved items and removing one early is worth more than it costs you.
Four weeks out, tell them the actual decision. Whether the machine travels with them or a replacement is waiting, what they need to do, and what happens if something goes wrong at a border. If they are carrying it, this is when the property letter arrives, not the night before.
Tell them explicitly what they will not be charged for. An employee who has just paid for a flight, a deposit and a shipping container is primed to assume every new cost lands on them. Saying plainly that any duty or handling on the company device is the company's cost removes an anxiety you did not know they had.
Give them one name, not a process. When a bag goes missing or a device is held, the useful thing is a person who answers. A shared inbox at the point somebody is standing in an airport is not help.
What to avoid is the message that arrives ten days before the flight asking what they want to do about the laptop. That is the company handing its unowned decision to the person least able to make it, at the worst possible moment, and it reads exactly like that from their side.
The device at a border, which deserves more than one line
A company laptop crossing a border is in a different situation from the same laptop on a desk, and the useful framing is not legal but practical.
It should be in the state your security policy already requires. Full disk encryption on, current patches, the normal controls applied. This is not about anticipating an examination. It is that relocation is exactly the moment when somebody has been living out of boxes for three weeks and the device has drifted from your baseline. Check it before they travel.
Decide what data needs to be on it at all. A machine carrying local copies of everything is a larger problem if it is lost or examined than one where the work lives in systems the person signs into. For most companies this is already how things work, and the relocation is a good prompt to confirm rather than assume it.
Agree what happens if the device is retained. Not because it is likely, but because the answer takes ten minutes to decide in advance and is extremely difficult to improvise. Who does the employee call, who talks to whom, what is the replacement path if the machine does not come back quickly. Having an answer costs nothing and the absence of one costs a week.
Be realistic about what you can ask of them. A relocating employee is not going to run a security checklist at an airport. Anything you need done should be done before they leave, by you, while the device is still reachable.
The proportionate position for most companies is: encrypted device, minimal local data, a property letter, a named contact. That covers the realistic cases without turning a house move into a security exercise.
Support and warranty in the new market
This is the factor that most often decides move-or-replace and it is the one people check last, usually after the decision has already been made.
Establish three things about the specific machine rather than about the manufacturer in general.
Does the warranty cover the destination country at all? International coverage is common on business ranges and absent on others, and it frequently depends on where the device was originally purchased rather than where it now is. The answer is specific to the serial number and the manufacturer will tell you if asked.
What service level applies there? A next-business-day on-site arrangement in one market can be a send-it-away-for-two-weeks arrangement in another, under the same warranty. That difference is invisible on paper and very visible the first time somebody needs a repair.
Who physically performs a repair, and how far away are they? In markets with thin service networks the practical answer may be that the device ships to another country, which turns a repair into a two-week absence and an import question of its own.
Then weigh it honestly. A machine with two years of warranty left that covers the destination properly is worth moving. A machine with eighteen months left on coverage that does not travel is a commitment to supporting it internationally for eighteen months, and that is a cost you have accepted without pricing.
The same check applies in reverse if you replace. Confirm the replacement is purchased in a way that gives local coverage, because a device bought in your headquarters market and shipped out can arrive with the same problem you were trying to avoid.
When several people move at once
Individual relocations are a checklist problem. Several at once is a different shape and the thing that changes is sequencing.
Team moves happen for real reasons: opening an office, consolidating a function, a group following a leader. When they do, the instinct is to handle each person's equipment the same way you would handle one person's, which multiplies a manual process by the number of people and overwhelms whoever owns it.
Batch the decision rather than the people. Make one move-or-replace call for the whole group where their situations are similar, rather than six separate ones. The arithmetic is the same and the decision cost collapses.
Stagger the gap weeks deliberately. If everyone's device is in transit in the same week, you have no spare capacity and no loaner pool, and a single delay affects several people. Sequencing even a few days apart gives you room to move a machine between people if something goes wrong.
Consider whether the destination now justifies local holding. Six people in a new market is a different proposition from one. If you are moving enough people to make the market meaningful, the question of local storage or a local arrangement moves from premature to timely, and deciding it during the move is cheaper than retrofitting it later.
And watch the market they are leaving. A group departure can empty a market entirely, which ends local arrangements, strands any equipment left behind and removes the people who would have helped recover it. Plan the exit from the old market with the same attention as the arrival in the new one.
One more thing that only shows up at group scale: the people moving are usually the ones who would normally help with this. A team relocation takes the person who knows where the spare dock lives and the person who has done the customs paperwork before, and moves both of them in the same month. Assume less internal capacity than usual rather than more, and decide early whether the group move is the point at which this stops being handled manually.
The return move, which nobody plans for
A meaningful proportion of relocations reverse. Assignments end, circumstances change, people move home. The return journey is usually handled worse than the outbound one because by then everybody has forgotten there was ever a process.
Two things make it easier. Record the decision you made the first time and why, in the asset record rather than in an email thread. Somebody handling the return in two years will otherwise have no idea whether the device travelled, was replaced, or what was agreed about costs.
And treat the return as a fresh move-or-replace decision rather than reversing the original one. The device is two years older, its warranty position has changed, and the residual value is lower. The calculation that favoured moving it outbound frequently favours retiring it locally on the way back, recovering what value remains in the market where it already sits.
The register, and the step that is always missing
The moment somebody lands, your asset record is wrong in at least one field and possibly four.
Country is wrong, which matters because retrieval routes and local arrangements follow country. Support and warranty arrangements may have changed. The device may now be outside any vendor coverage you have. And the holding arrangement, if there was one in the old market, may no longer exist.
The fix is one line in the relocation checklist, owned by whoever owns the checklist: update the asset record on the confirmed arrival date, not on the planned one. Plans slip and the record should follow reality.
While you are there, this is a good moment to reconcile the one device rather than waiting for a general audit. The person is reachable, they have just handled the machine, and asking them to read back a serial number costs them thirty seconds.
| Checklist step | Owner | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Decide move or replace | IT with finance input | When the move is agreed |
| Confirm route and who pays any charge | HR, with the decision written down | Four weeks before travel |
| Issue property letter if travelling in luggage | IT | Two weeks before |
| Arrange loaner or sequence the replacement | IT | Two weeks before |
| Update asset record with new country | Whoever owns the register | On confirmed arrival |
| Reconcile that one device | Same | Within a week of arrival |
| Review old-market arrangement | HR or operations | Within a month |
Everything that is not the laptop
This whole article has been about one machine, which is how these conversations usually go and is why the rest of the kit becomes a surprise in the final week.
A typical remote employee holds a laptop, a monitor, a dock, a keyboard, a mouse, a headset and possibly a chair. The laptop gets a decision. The other six items get packed by the employee or abandoned, and either outcome happens without anybody recording it.
The monitor is the one that causes arguments. It is bulky, it is awkward to ship, its residual value is low relative to the cost of moving it, and it is almost never worth relocating internationally. Say so early, because an employee who assumes their monitor is coming and discovers at the last minute that it is not will have made space for it and planned around it.
The chair is worse and nobody mentions it. If the company paid for a chair, somebody has to decide whether it travels, is written off, is sold locally or stays with the employee. That decision is cheap to make in advance and genuinely awkward to make while a removals firm is standing in somebody's flat.
Peripherals are usually right to replace. The combined cost of a keyboard, mouse, dock and headset is small against the cost and risk of shipping them, and replacing them at the destination is faster. The exception is anything the person has specifically chosen and adapted to.
And that exception matters more than the rest of this section. If somebody uses equipment arranged as a workplace adjustment, a specific chair, a particular keyboard, a screen arrangement set up for a visual condition, none of the above applies. That equipment is not a peripheral to be replaced with whatever is in stock, and the person should not be in a position where they land in a new country and discover their arrangement has been treated as a commodity purchase. Ask, and route it through whoever handles adjustments rather than through the standard process.
So the practical move is to list the full holding before deciding anything, not just the machine. Seven items with a decision each takes ten minutes and prevents every version of this conversation happening in the final week.
Contractors and the people who are not employees
Relocation processes are built for employees, and a growing share of the people holding company devices are not.
A contractor who moves country has changed the same things an employee has: the device is in a new market, the register is wrong, the retrieval route has changed and any local arrangement may no longer apply. What has not changed is that your relocation checklist almost certainly does not cover them, because they do not go through the HR process that triggers it.
In practice nobody finds out. A contractor relocating is not an event the company processes, and the first time anybody notices is when the engagement ends and a collection is attempted in the wrong country.
Two cheap controls. Ask about location at renewal, since contractor engagements usually have a renewal point and a one-line question there catches most moves. And make the asset record's country field something you review on engagement end rather than trust, because for this population it is more likely to be stale than accurate.
The deeper question, whether a contractor should be holding a company device at all rather than using their own, is a separate decision with its own trade-offs. But if they do hold one, the relocation gap applies to them and nothing in your existing process will catch it.
Where the vendors fit
Three routes, each with a real failure mode.
A general courier. Cheapest and entirely adequate for a straightforward move between two major markets. It struggles when customs asks a question, because the answer has to come from you and you may not have one.
A customs broker or specialist shipper. They handle the declaration and the importer question properly, which is what you are paying for. They struggle on small volumes, where the per-shipment cost against a single laptop is poor, and they do nothing about the register or the gap week.
An equipment platform. Procurement, delivery and retrieval across markets, which covers the replace-at-destination route cleanly as well as the move route. They struggle where the destination is outside their coverage, which is exactly where you most need help, so the question is about your specific market rather than about the category.
RemoAsset is our own product and that is the disclosure rather than a footnote. It covers procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries and publishes a Subscription tier from $1,499 a year. For relocation specifically, the relevant capability is issuing a replacement in the destination market and recovering the original where it already sits, which is the clean version of this problem. Three limits to state plainly, because a relocation plan built on a wrong assumption is a bad week for somebody who has just moved: it enrols devices but is not an MDM in its own right, so endpoint controls remain your separate arrangement; it wipes devices but is not a certified ITAD, so formal disposal certificates are separate; and coverage and lead times vary by market, which is the whole question when the destination is unusual.
The decision table
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary Pain | Recommended Starting Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic move | Any | Any | None, administratively | Update the address and move on |
| Major market to major market | Under 200 | Courier relationship, spreadsheet register | Nobody owns the decision | Run move-or-replace, then a property letter |
| Into a market with no presence | Any | No local entity | Importer of record question | Replace at destination if supply allows |
| Specialist or hard-to-source device | Any | Any | Replacement is not practical | Move it, with a broker and a planned gap |
| Frequent relocations | 200 plus | Several moves a year | Same questions re-answered each time | Put it in the relocation checklist permanently |
| Person was your only employee there | Any | Local arrangement in the old market | An arrangement nobody cancels | Review the old-market arrangement within a month |
The one-page brief that replaces most of this
If you take one artefact from this article, make it a single page that travels with the relocation file. It answers the five unowned questions in advance and it is the difference between a process and an improvisation.
Decision. Move or replace, with one line on why. Dated, so a later reader knows what was known at the time.
Route. Luggage, courier or specialist shipper, and if luggage, whether hand or checked.
Costs. Who pays duty, handling, a broker fee or a replacement. Written down so nobody has to ask while standing in an airport.
Full holding. Every item the person has, not just the machine, with a decision against each. This is the line that prevents the final-week monitor conversation.
Dates. When the device leaves, when the replacement arrives, and what covers the gap between.
Names. Who owns this internally, who the employee calls if something happens in transit, and who updates the register on arrival.
That page takes twenty minutes to fill in at the point the move is agreed. Every expensive outcome described in this article comes from one of those six lines being blank, and most of them come from the first.
What getting this wrong actually costs
The visible cost is a customs charge or a delayed device, and neither is large on a single move.
The cost that accumulates is register drift. A dozen relocations handled informally means a dozen records that say the wrong country, and the point at which that matters is the point at which somebody tries to retrieve a device from a market where you have no arrangement, because the record said they were somewhere else. That is a small problem repeated until it becomes a project.
The cost nobody plans for is the employee's first week. Somebody who has just moved continents, usually with family, usually with a lot going on, spending their first days at a new desk without a working machine is a bad start that they will remember. It is also entirely avoidable with a loaner or a sequenced replacement, which is why the gap week section above is the practical heart of this.
So the question to ask is not what the shipping costs. It is whether anybody owns this decision at all, because in most companies the honest answer is no, and that is what produces every outcome above.
When relocation becomes a process rather than an event
For most companies relocation is rare enough to handle case by case, and that is correct while it is rare.
It stops being correct at about three or four moves a year, which is where the same questions get answered differently each time by whoever happens to be involved. One person gets a replacement, the next carries theirs, a third ships it and expenses the duty, and nobody notices the inconsistency because each move is handled in isolation.
The fix is not a policy document. It is two lines in the existing relocation checklist, one that forces the move-or-replace decision at the point the move is agreed, and one that updates the asset record on arrival. Everything else in this article is detail that hangs off those two lines.
If your company is at that volume and the checklist does not mention equipment, that is the gap, and it costs an afternoon to close.
Frequently asked questions
Should the employee just take the laptop in their luggage?
Often yes, and it is what usually happens, but make it a decision rather than a default. Give them a short letter naming the device and its serial number and confirming it is company property being transported for business use, decide explicitly whether it goes in hand luggage rather than checked baggage, and agree who absorbs the loss if a bag does not arrive. The route itself is frequently fine; what causes problems is nobody having thought about it, so that the employee improvises at a border with no documentation and no named person to call.
Is it cheaper to ship the device or replace it?
Replacement wins more often than people expect, which is why the comparison is worth running even when the answer feels obvious. Count shipping plus any duty and broker fees against the cost of a new machine less the residual value of the old one, then add warranty and support into the comparison. A device whose warranty does not transfer becomes something you support internationally for its remaining life, and that cost shows up the first time it needs a repair. Specialist configurations and constrained supply markets tip it the other way.
Who is responsible for import duty on a relocating employee's laptop?
That depends on the route, the countries and how the device is declared, and it is genuinely different in different situations rather than having one answer. The important thing is deciding internally who pays before the move rather than after, because an employee who receives an unexpected charge in the middle of relocating will reasonably expect the company to cover it and will be annoyed if that was never agreed. For anything beyond a straightforward move between two major markets, take local advice rather than relying on a general rule.
When does the asset register get updated?
On the confirmed arrival date rather than the planned one, because relocation dates slip and a record updated from a plan is a record that is wrong in a new way. Add it as an explicit line in the relocation checklist with a named owner, since nothing else in the process will trigger it. While you are updating, reconcile that single device by asking the employee to read back the serial number, because they have just handled the machine and are easier to reach about it now than they will be in six months.
What should we do about the gap between devices?
Plan for it rather than hoping it is short. The cheapest fix is a loaner waiting at the destination if you have any local presence or a vendor who can arrange one, which removes the problem entirely. The next best is sequencing: send the replacement ahead so it arrives before the person does, and have them carry the old machine for the overlap, which gives a clean handover and makes recovering the old device straightforward. The arrangement to avoid is shipping on the day they fly, which puts both the person and the device in transit with nobody holding anything.
Does the employee's warranty follow them to the new country?
Sometimes, and it depends on the manufacturer, the original purchase region and the specific terms, so check the individual machine rather than assuming either way. International warranty arrangements exist and are common on business ranges, but coverage and service levels frequently differ from the home market, and a next-business-day arrangement in one country can be a send-it-away arrangement in another. This is the factor that most often tips a close move-or-replace decision toward replacement, so establish it before running the comparison rather than afterwards.
What if the person was our only employee in the country they are leaving?
Review what was arranged locally on their behalf and what happens to it now, within a month of their departure. Companies commonly hold a local arrangement, a storage provision or a supplier relationship that existed solely to support one person, and those do not cancel themselves. The same review should establish whether any equipment remains in that market, because a device left behind in a country where you now have nobody is considerably harder to recover later than one collected while somebody was still there.
How do we handle this if it happens several times a year?
Put it in the relocation checklist permanently rather than solving it each time. Two lines do most of the work: one forcing the move-or-replace decision at the point the relocation is agreed, and one updating the asset record on confirmed arrival. Everything else is detail that hangs off those. The failure mode at three or four moves a year is not that any individual move goes badly, it is that each one is handled differently by whoever happens to be involved, and nobody notices the inconsistency because the moves are months apart.
Where this leaves you
Relocation is a well-run process in most companies with one unowned question sitting inside it.
Decide move or replace deliberately, at the point the move is agreed rather than ten days before the flight. Settle who pays any charge before anybody is at an airport. Plan the gap week, because that is where the real damage lands and a loaner removes it. And update the register on arrival, because the alternative is a dozen records that quietly say the wrong country.
None of that is difficult. It is two lines in a checklist that already exists.
The reason it keeps being missed is structural rather than careless. Relocation sits with HR, equipment sits with IT, the cost sits with finance, and the person who notices the gap is usually the employee, who has no authority to close it and the least capacity to think about it. Nobody is doing their job badly. The question simply falls between three functions that each reasonably assume one of the others has it.
So if you fix one thing after reading this, make it ownership rather than process. Name the function that owns the equipment line in the relocation checklist, write that down somewhere the next person will find it, and the rest of this article becomes detail they can work out for themselves.
