Before I built Edventory I ran the tools everyone runs. Freshservice, then Freshdesk for the help desk side. Snipe-IT for assets. Spreadsheets for everything that fell through the cracks, which was a lot. I want to be fair to those tools, because they are not bad. They are just not built for this job.
Here is the core problem. Each of them does one slice well. Freshdesk is a fine help desk. Snipe-IT is a fine asset tracker. But a school technology department does not have one job, it has twenty, and they are all connected. The ticket is about a device. The device has a repair history. The repair history feeds the replacement budget. The budget includes the license renewals. The staff in the help desk are the same staff you are running phishing tests against. When your tools each own one slice, you become the integration layer. You are the one copying information between systems, reconciling them by hand, and holding the connections in your head because no tool holds them for you.
That is the gap I could not close with off the shelf tools, no matter how I configured them. I did not want five good tools and a full time job stitching them together. I wanted one place where the device, the ticket, the cost, the renewal, and the people all live together and stay connected on their own.
So I built it. Not because the other tools are bad, but because none of them were built for the actual shape of this work. The shape of K-12 technology is wide and connected. The tool should be too.