What is Equipment?
Equipment refers to physical assets used in your operations, such as vehicles, machines, and devices. The key difference from a material is that each equipment unit is tracked individually with its own serial number.
In practice, Equipment is the larger, installable asset your team sells and installs (for example, a water softener, a reverse osmosis system, or an HVAC unit), while materials are the smaller parts and consumables that go with it.
What makes Equipment different from a material:
It's tracked unit by unit using serial numbers, instead of just a total quantity.
It has lifecycle and warranty fields (lifespan, warranties, maintenance period), since each unit gets installed at a customer's property and needs to be followed over time.
It can have associated materials, meaning the parts an equipment needs to be installed or to operate.
Video Tutorial
Creating a new equipment item
Creating equipment is a three-step flow. From the catalog, start a new item and select the Equipment item type.
Step 1: General Information
This is where you enter the core details of the equipment.
Images: add photos of the equipment (PNG, JPG, JPEG, up to 10 MB).
Name (required): the name of the equipment.
Item Number (required): the equipment's code or SKU.
Equipment Type: the functional category of the equipment (for example, Water Softener, Reverse Osmosis System, Under Sink System). You can create new types using the "+" button.
Description: a free-text description.
Under Origin, you add the specs:
Category: the catalog category you want to group it under.
Brand, Model, and Manufacturer.
Measurement unit.
Under Warranty, you capture the lifecycle details:
Equipment Lifespan: the equipment's estimated useful life, in years.
Manufacturer Warranty Duration: the manufacturer's warranty length, in years.
Service Provider Warranty Duration: the warranty you (the service provider) offer on the install, in years.
Maintenance period: how often it needs maintenance, in years.
Note: these warranty and lifecycle fields are currently informational only. They don't trigger any alerts or notifications yet (for example, there's no automatic "lifespan is reaching its limit" or "maintenance is due" warning), and you enter a number of years rather than a specific date. Notifications based on these fields are planned for a future update.
Under Prices, you set:
Cost for Business: what the equipment costs your company.
Cost for Client: what you charge the customer.
You can also add Suppliers for the equipment and upload Attachments (up to 5 MB), such as manuals or spec sheets.
Step 2: Equipment Materials
Here you can associate materials that are tied to the equipment.
It's important to understand how this works, because it's different from a kit.
Equipment Materials does not require you to hold stock of each individual material, and it doesn't deduct them. The system assumes the equipment already comes assembled. Instead, the associated materials act as a record of the parts that belong to or were used for that equipment, similar to a service record, so you keep a history over time.
A couple of things to know:
You can only add materials that already exist in your catalog. You don't create new materials from here.
For each material you add, you set the quantity
Step 3: Stock Setup
This is where you set the initial stock of the equipment and assign it to your warehouse locations.
Location: the warehouse or location where the units will live.
Quantity: how many units you're adding.
Serial numbers: because each unit is tracked individually, you enter one serial number per unit. The number of serial numbers must match the On Hand quantity, so if you're adding 2 units, you'll need to enter 2 serial numbers.
Position at Location: the physical spot within the warehouse (Aisle, Bay, Level, Bin). These are optional.
Once everything is filled in, save the equipment.
Syncing equipment with your Service Titan account.
If your Ply account is integrated with a Field Service Management like ServiceTitan, equipment syncs between the two systems in both directions:
From Ply to your FSM: changes sync instantly.
From your FSM to Ply: updates come through when a sync runs, so they aren't instant.
The Manufacturer Warranty Duration and Service Provider Warranty Duration fields also sync with your FSM, since FSM equipment includes these same fields.
Already have equipment in your FSM?
If your equipment is already set up in your FSM, you don't need to create each one manually in Ply. You can bring them in through the sync instead:
Make sure your FSM is connected to Ply.
Run a sync (or reset it) so your equipment data flows from your FSM into Ply.
Once the sync completes, your equipment will appear in Ply automatically.
The equipment lifecycle at a glance
Putting it all together, here's the full journey of an equipment item in Ply:
Create it with its general info, associated materials, and initial stock (with serial numbers).
Each unit is tracked individually by serial number.
Update each unit's status over time as it moves from Available to Installation, Installed, Service Due, Serviced, and eventually Retired.
Still have questions?