Back of house is where the count goes missing
Nobody counts a dish pit from memory. Hotel and restaurant losses are consistently under-measured not on the large equipment, which is memorable, but on the categories held in quantity: sheet pans, hotel pans, china, glassware, flatware, smallwares, linen, uniforms and dry stores. Those categories reach a five-figure sum on their own and appear on almost no self-prepared list.
Front of house matters too. Guest room FF&E multiplies across a floor count, and a hotel with two hundred rooms has two hundred of everything — case goods, seating, soft goods, televisions, safes, minibars — each of which is a line with its own replacement cost.
Commercial kitchen equipment
Cook lines, hood and suppression systems, walk-in refrigeration, ice machines, mixers, combi ovens and dishwashing equipment are recorded by manufacturer, model and serial number with nameplates photographed. Most of it is discontinued within a few years, so valuation depends on pricing a current equivalent rather than the original, and the installation, gas, ventilation and electrical work is frequently a larger number than the equipment itself.
Walk-in contents are itemized by product and quantity. Bar stock is counted by bottle. Both are routinely estimated and both are straightforward to count.
Business interruption depends on the inventory
Hospitality operators need to reopen, and what they can reopen with depends on what survived and what can be replaced quickly. An inventory that separates equipment that is functional, equipment that is restorable and equipment that must be replaced is the document that drives that decision, which is why condition is recorded as observed rather than characterized.