An inventory in GLPI without financial data tells you what you have. An inventory with financial data tells you what it costs you — and who pays for it. That's what connects IT to the rest of the business that plans capacity and budgets. This article is about wiring those fields up, what to put into them, and how to get reports out of them that finance also understands.
Financial fields on an asset
Open a computer detail in GLPI and switch to the Management tab. You'll find pre-built fields:
- Supplier — dropdown referencing Setup → Dropdowns → Suppliers.
- Date of purchase, Date of last physical inventory, Warranty expiration date — the typical date set that ties accounting to operations.
- Value — purchase price. GLPI stores it as a decimal with 4-place precision.
- Warranty value — extended-warranty price, if billed separately.
- Budget — link to Management → Budgets; budget categories the asset belongs to.
- Order number, Invoice number — free-text references to accounting records.
For deeper depreciation analysis see IT asset depreciation in GLPI — here we focus on capturing the primary cost data.
Suppliers and Contracts
Two separate but related objects:
- Supplier (Management → Suppliers) — vendor contact and billing details. One record per company; you reuse it across all assets sourced from there.
- Contract (Management → Contracts) — agreement with start, end, auto-renewal, and amount. Attaches to assets (HW warranties, leasing) and to users (SaaS access).
A real example: a Dell Latitude has Supplier = "Dell Slovakia s.r.o.", Contract = "Dell ProSupport 3-year 2024-2027", Value = €1,280. As the warranty approaches expiration, GLPI cron sends a notification (via business rule) to the IT manager 30 days ahead.
Multi-currency
A stock GLPI install is single-currency. In Setup → General → Default values you set the currency symbol shown next to amounts (€, $, CZK). For international deployments with assets bought across countries that's not enough.
The fix:
- Currency plugin from the Marketplace adds multi-currency support — each asset has its own currency and GLPI converts to a chosen reporting currency at the purchase-date rate.
- Without the plugin you can lean on entity structure: a separate entity per country with its own currency configured in the Profile of users in that entity. Reports are then per-entity.
Cost reporting
Once financial fields are populated, GLPI offers three paths to reporting:
- Saved searches (Search → Save) — the simplest path. A filter over computers grouped by, say, Department with a sum on the Value column. Export to CSV or PDF.
- Statistics module — built-in charts over financial fields, average price per category, distribution per supplier.
- Dashboards in GLPI 10+ — custom dashboard widgets with aggregation (sum, avg, count) on any field. Suited to a management view.
The kind of questions the business asks that GLPI can answer:
- "How much have we spent on hardware in the last year per department?" — search where date_purchase > -1y, group by users_id.groups, sum value.
- "Which assets go out of warranty in the next quarter?" — saved search over warranty_expiration_date in the +0 to +90 days range.
- "How much do we pay vendor X annually?" — aggregate value grouped by suppliers_id.
Accounting integration
GLPI is not an accounting system. Accountants will not ask you to enter VAT-aware depreciation into GLPI. The integration goal is the opposite direction: get a cost overview out of GLPI so accounting doesn't have to do manual reconciliation.
Three paths:
- Manual export — CSV from a saved search, monthly to the accountant. Sufficient for small companies with a few dozen assets.
- REST API (GLPI REST API) — automated export to the accounting system (Pohoda, MoneyS3, SAP, etc.). A scheduled cron job pulls new assets and reconciles against received invoices.
- BI tools (Metabase, Power BI) — read-only connection to the GLPI database with dashboards consolidating costs across entities and time periods.
Common mistakes
- Net vs gross prices not aligned — pick one convention (typically net, matching the procurement-cost record in accounting) and hold it across all records.
- Missing price for donated hardware — for donations and outdoor sponsorship assets may land with Value = 0, which skews reporting. Enter the estimated market value with a note in Comments.
- Contracts without an expiration — some contracts "auto-renew". In GLPI this means warning notifications never fire. Set a realistic end date and configure auto-renewal via Contract → Renewal frequency.
Without financial fields GLPI is an inventory list for IT. With them it's a bridge to the rest of the business that wants to know where the money went. Backfilling history takes a few days; the way out is automation — the agent fills hardware data, a business rule fills price from the invoice, no one writes into free-text fields by hand.