Braintree Public Schools

When you’re responsible for nearly 12,000 IT assets across a large school district in Massachusetts, there’s no room for guesswork.

Lizender Santos Afonso and Jason Cheung, two IT technicians in the Braintree Public Schools district, know this reality well. Between the two, they handle the daily flood of helpdesk tickets, device loans, system changes, initial inventorying, labeling, spreadsheet creation, and bulk imports.

Together, they keep technology flowing to approximately 7,000 students and staff members.

The scope alone is staggering. But the real challenge is tracking device lifecycles across nine years of schooling while managing constant returns, swaps, breakages, and the inevitable chaos of putting expensive technology in the hands of kids.

The early adopter bet

Their previous director discovered Reftab and was immediately intrigued by their approach to school IT asset management.

The value proposition was clear with comparable functionality to enterprise-level tools, but at a price point that made sense for a school district budget. More importantly, the platform could actually handle the specific workflows that education IT teams needed.

“So he jumped on the opportunity, and he talked to them, and he was able to bring it in as part of one of our many systems,” Lizender adds.

And almost immediately, Reftab became a core system.

“So for me, I literally have a Reftab tab open in one of my tabs at all times of the day,” says Lizender.

One platform, thousands of moving pieces

With Reftab, the team gained something they’d never had before: a single source of truth for all 12,000 assets.

“I think in Reftab, currently we have close to 12,000 assets in there, and that’s anything from Chromebooks, monitors, desktops, iPads, and even accessories. So it’s honestly just perfect to have all that in the same area,” Lizender says.

Plus, the loanee system became essential to daily operations. Students get checked out Chromebooks from 4th grade straight through graduation. Staff members reserve devices for specific timeframes. The system sends automated email reminders when returns are overdue.

“We could look into it and see 7,000 users in there for loanees. So it’s just really helpful to have all that in the same place where we could just go from one end to the other and work with what we have to work with in whatever capacity,” he adds.

Beyond loans, the change log and loan history features provide complete device accountability. When a student claims they never had a particular Chromebook, Lizender can pull up the exact loan history. When parts get swapped during repairs, the change log shows what happened and when.

“So it helps keep track of all that stuff,” Lizender notes.

The team also uses Reftab to track software licenses across platforms like Adobe and Edpuzzle. License counts, renewal dates, expiration timelines, and pricing all live in one place instead of scattered across various spreadsheets and email threads.

For a team managing this volume of assets, reporting isn’t optional. They run reports constantly, from tracking specific Chromebook models to monitoring loan status for graduating seniors and identifying end-of-life devices that need retirement.

“So some specific example is that the iPad Air twos were out of support two years ago, so we needed a report of how many devices we had of those and how many were actually still currently out,” Jason notes.

One report answers the question without having to dig through spreadsheets. 

The API integration breakthrough

When you need to rename a single Chromebook, this workflow is tedius. When you need to rename over a thousand, it becomes impossible.

Jason saw the problem clearly. Every time they needed to rename devices in bulk, someone had to manually update Reftab, then manually update Google Admin Console, then print and apply new physical labels. The same information was being entered three times, across three different systems, with plenty of room for error at every step.

Until he realized Reftab’s API solved this problem by connecting to Google Sheets and App Scripts.

“I think one aspect that I use a decent amount is the Reftab API. We use that for our Google sheets and app script integrations, just when we had to do bulk edits for different things rather than doing manual entries across three different systems and changing them across three different systems,” Jason explains.

Now, the process of renaming devices in bulk happens simultaneously across Reftab and Google Admin. 

When you’re renaming over a thousand Chromebooks, this integration transforms days of tedious work into minutes of automated execution.

The team also struggled with inconsistent naming conventions that had accumulated over time. Some assets used “Serial Number” as an identifier. Others used “SN.” Still others used “serial tag.”

“I think one thing that I really helped was the custom fields. So when we started we had different identifiers for Serial Number. Some were called sn, and then other things were called serial tag, serial tag. So all three of those, having to do all three different things is a lot of work, but having the custom field and that value variable definitely allowed a lot of accessibility with making sure that things were all updated to the right thing,” Jason recalls.

Without standardized fields, organizing assets meant either living with chaos or manually fixing thousands of entries.

The moment that made them stop and message the team

Reftab already worked well. The team had settled into reliable workflows, and the platform did what they needed.

Then came an update to the import system:

“The importing system, there was nothing wrong with it before, but since they’ve come up with an update . . . I was so surprised that I put it in our work chat and I said, ‘Wow, Reftab’s really stepped their game up with this one,” Lizender recalls.

That reaction captures something essential about the platform. Reftab wasn’t just fixing broken things. The team was actively making good features better based on how users actually worked.

This pattern has continued. The platform has consistently shipped quality-of-life improvements that directly address real user workflows.

“And like I said, they’ve just added so many quality of life features over the past couple of years that it’s only gotten better,” Lizender notes.

Support remains responsive and helpful on the rare occasions when they need it.

For a team that spends all day managing other people’s technology problems, having a platform partner that actually ships improvements matters.

The system that scales

Today, Lizender and Jason manage nearly 12,000 assets and 7,000 active loanees from a single platform. 

The triple-entry workflow that once consumed days now runs in minutes through API automation. When a student claims they never had a particular Chromebook, change logs and loan histories answer the question instantly. Software licenses across Adobe, CloudPath, Druva, and Edpuzzle now live in one place instead of scattered across spreadsheets. End-of-life reporting identifies unsupported devices before they become security risks, which gives the district time to plan replacements strategically instead of reactively.

Custom fields standardized the naming chaos that made organizing thousands of assets nearly impossible. Bulk edits that once required touching three separate systems now happen simultaneously. Complete accountability exists for every device in their inventory without manual tracking.

But perhaps the most telling metric is the simplest one.

Lizender still has that Reftab tab open all day, every day. Because when you’re responsible for keeping technology flowing to 7,000 students and staff, you need a system that can keep up.

As the district continues to grow and device lifecycles evolve, they have a platform built to scale with them. One that’s open in Lizender’s browser tab every single day.