Royal Armouries Museum uses MRI’s software to track its assets

All of the display cases, storage and infrastructure required to hold the museum’s collection of armour and weaponry securely are tracked using 21st Century software from MRI Software

Britain’s oldest museum, the Royal Armouries, purchased fixed asset software from MRI Software to improve the asset tracking and management of its £55 million fixed asset base across three historic locations.

The three sites hold one of the largest collections of arms and armour in the world, comprising the UK’s National Collection of Arms and Armour, National Artillery Collection and National Firearms Collection.

The museum invested in MRI’s software to improve the efficient tracking of all its assets, to eliminate the time-consuming and potentially inaccurate process of spreadsheet accounting and to readily comply with the Modified Historic Cost Accounting legislation (MHCA). The software embeds pictures of the actual assets into the asset database which proves enormously valuable for all those engaged in re-valuations and indexation.

Operating for over 500 years, The Royal Armouries is one of the oldest museums in the world and has three sites; the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, the world-famous Tower of London and Fort Nelson near Portsmouth. As the keeper of part of the UK’s national heritage, it has a duty of care for these objects, to keep them, study them and increase public knowledge of them, so that this can be passed on to future generations along with the objects themselves.

MHCA, an accounting convention led by the Treasury framework, dictates that public sector bodies should have their assets reflected at current values by using appropriate price indices. Brian Ball, Finance and Administration Director at the Royal Armouries, explains, “We were solely dependent on manual asset tracking prior to investing in MRI’s software. With an asset base of over £55 million, this time-consuming process carried a huge admin overhead.