Valuing company phones that are still out with your staff
14 October 2026 · 6 min read
When everyone worked in one building, retiring old phones meant collecting a box from the IT room. Now a company's handsets are in home offices, branches, vans and drawers across the country. Getting them back just to find out what they're worth is slow, costly and often not worth doing. There's a better order.
The problem with "ship everything first"
The traditional disposal process assumes the devices are together: collect them, test them at a depot, then agree a value. For a dispersed fleet, each step gets harder:
- Logistics before information. You pay to move devices before you know whether they're worth moving.
- Lost visibility. Once phones are in transit or at a depot, you're relying on someone else's report of what arrived and in what condition.
- Stragglers. Phones that are hard to retrieve never get processed, so their value drains away in a drawer.
Test where the device is
Remote diagnostics flip the order. The test runs on the handset itself, wherever it is: the member of staff installs a diagnostic app, connects it with a code, and follows the guided checks. The results come back to a central dashboard.
You get the same kind of information a depot would produce, including battery health, screen and touch, cameras, sensors, and the device's IMEI and lock status, without the device moving. Only then do you decide what happens next:
- reissue it to someone else;
- repair it, if the repair costs less than the value it adds;
- sell it, at a price based on its tested condition; or
- recycle it.
Combine remote and on-site testing
Most organisations need both. Devices that come back to one place, such as a returns desk, a depot or a decommissioning room, are quicker to test in volume on a tethered station. Devices still out with staff are better tested remotely. What matters is that both routes land in the same place, so the fleet has one record rather than two spreadsheets.
Lock the value before anything ships
Once each device has a test result, it can have a price attached to that result. If that price is locked rather than indicative, the business can plan around it: finance knows the recovery value, and nothing is re-graded after collection, because the grading has already happened.
Repairs are worth keeping separate from the price. Valuing a device as tested, with any repair cost shown next to it, makes the trade-off visible: repair and sell for more, or sell as it is.
Don't skip the data side
A remote test tells you what a device is worth. It doesn't replace secure erasure before the device changes hands. Make sure every device that leaves the business is erased to a recognised standard, with a certificate per device. Our guide to disposing of company mobile phones covers that step, along with releasing devices from your management systems.