How to follow individual items?

Is there a way to follow an individual item besides its serial number. I am looking for something like an LPN. Say I get four tablets and want to hand them out to four employees. The serial number field would be provided by the manufacturer but I still need a way to assign it an internal ID and label it before giving out. The tablets are not assets.

I am looking into ERPNext again with v15 and I’m still not sure how people are doing this despite reading many questions about it over the past few days.

Should I be generating an internal use serial numbers on every item we receive and then adding fields to track those and keep track of manufacture serial number if it exists? What do other people do to keep track of tools, books and such things that are not assets but still need to be kept track of.