Plan the waves, move the machines, wipe them to standard, and know what the outgoing fleet is worth before you commit the budget.
The fleet doesn't move on a date. It moves in waves, by site and by role, over months — and every wave has to land the new machine before the old one leaves.
Machines go out by site, department or role over months. Each wave needs kits staged ahead of it, processing capacity booked behind it, and a receiving window that doesn't collide with the wave already in flight.
Get the sequence wrong and you're choosing between a person sitting without a machine and a machine sitting in a drawer nobody's collecting. Neither is a logistics problem by the time it reaches you — it's a support ticket and a manager asking why.
The new spend gets approved in one quarter and the outgoing fleet is settled in another, usually by whoever hauls it away. So the offset never lands in the business case that needed it.
The outgoing fleet is an asset with a number on it. You should have that number while the budget is still open, not after the trucks have gone.
By site, department or role, so the business is never short of machines.
The new device lands before the old one leaves.
Against the new spend, so the offset is in the business case rather than discovered afterwards.
Kit supply and processing throughput matched to wave size.
For the whole program — not 600 unrelated records.
No-shows, no-boots, wrong device returned, people who've moved.
Included. Not a consulting line item.
We published the cost benchmark because nobody else had. Kit and freight are the part that gets quoted; the staff hours behind each device are the rest of it.
That gives you a clean test to apply to any provider, including us: chasing one device back costs about $210, so a managed program priced under $210 per device costs less than doing it yourself — before you count a single unit that never comes back. Circular Momentum Research Brief, Jul 2026
What a returned device is worth is a different question, and it doesn't have one answer. A three-year-old machine and a five-year-old one of the same model can land in completely different places, and once processing is paid for, plenty of older units clear very little. That variation is exactly why every device in a refresh is valued individually, on its own specs and grade, rather than settled against a published average. The engine behind that carries over a million priced observations — depth that exists so the number can follow the actual machine. Circular Momentum FMV Engine · 2023–2026
The engine that produces the number is operated independently of the processor, the packaging provider and the reseller, and it takes no share of the settlement. The party valuing the asset isn't the party that profits from the spread. Each valuation shows its basis — comparables, sample size, confidence.
Two numbers, and we're precise about which is which: an estimate up front on a Grade A basis, so the recovery can go in the refresh plan — and the final settlement at close, itemized per unit once the device is received and graded.
Market value computed from the device's real specifications and its grade, then your fee schedule applied line by line. Finance gets an export, not a summary. Proof, not promises.
A refresh moves your data out of the building on hundreds of machines at once. The certificate is the only thing that closes that out, so it's generated by the system rather than typed by a person.
Certified data destruction to NIST 800-88 purge standards, under an R2v3 chain of custody. Wipe results arrive from the sanitization tools — Certus and Blackbelt 360 — automatically, and attach to the right unit by serial number.
Drives are pulled and destroyed individually, and get their own certificate. Nothing is passed forward on the assumption that it worked.
A device stops being used long before it's collected, and it isn't provably clean until someone certifies it. Closing that window at the start — wipe and validate in place, then ship a device already proven clean — is coming as a paid option. Tell us if it matters to you when we scope the program; it affects sequencing.
Your logo, your colors, your program name, your domain. Employees sign in and see their own company — not a vendor's. Admins invite people; there's no self-signup to police. Your name on the door.
Open, in transit, received, settled — every unit in the wave with its status and its net. Bulk import a site or a department from a CSV, or wire it to the asset system you already run: ServiceNow and asset-management integrations are supported, and the finance export is built to be reconciled, not read.
| Employee | Device | Status | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pat Rowan | EliteBook 840 G10 | Complete | $244.00 |
| Drew Castillo | UltraSharp 27″ ×2 | Complete | $18.00 |
| Drew Castillo | Latitude 5440 | In transit | — |
| Pat Rowan | ThinkPad X1 Carbon | Received | — |
The timeline moves on carrier scans — kit shipped, kit delivered, device received — straight from FedEx. Kit orders placed by 3PM ET ship the same day, with the prepaid return label already in the box. Nobody chases a tracking number, and nobody updates a spreadsheet.
Audit, wipe result and certificate sit against the unit that produced them, so the security answer and the settlement answer describe the same device instead of living in two systems.
| Data destruction | PASS · Purge | NIST 800-88 |
| Certificate | certificate-of-destruction.pdf attached | |
| Storage health | Good | 512 GB NVMe |
| Battery | Fair | 142 cycles |
| Component tests | CPU · RAM · Storage | 3 / 3 pass |
If you want it, each returned asset can carry a report of its avoided Scope 3 emissions, calculated per device class and split by what actually happened to the unit. A laptop that is resold avoids roughly 224 kg CO₂e, against about 5.0 kg if the same machine is recycled instead — so the decision that recovers the most value is also the one that avoids the most emissions. The reuse figure applies to units that are actually resold. It's an option, not standard scope, and it reports out of the same chain of custody that produced the certificate.
Avoided Scope 3 emissions per laptop, from the Circular Momentum FMV Engine — the same engine that values the device. Figures are per device class, not a fleet average.We model device movement as pickup and delivery events across a 2,500-device fleet — every reason a machine changes hands, in both directions. Refresh is the largest, but a program that only handles refresh leaves the rest to email.
That's 1,700–2,450 pickup/delivery events a year on that basis fleet — and it's worth being exact about what that total is. It is not a return volume. Two of those six categories send devices out, and the platform runs the same way forwards as it does back. Remote staff generate about 0.7–1 of these events each per year on their own. Device-movement model, Circular Momentum · basis: a 2,500-device fleet · unit: pickup/delivery events
71% of employers of employers have had a departing employee not return equipment — averaging $1,963 of hardware. Read that the honest way: it's the share of companies that have had at least one incident, not a rate per device. Which makes it a problem almost every organisation has, and an argument for handling offboarding on the same rails as refresh rather than on a manager's calendar reminder.
Capterra 2022 Employee Offboarding Survey, n=287We built the platform so the answer to all four is yes. Ask anyone else the same four.
Tell us the shape of your fleet and the shape of the refresh. We'll come back with volume, recovery, and a wave plan.