How do you record sanitation assets so the data can be reused across institutions?
Record them against the Sanitation Asset Standard, a common definition of sanitation assets covering containment, emptying, treatment and the links between them. Data collected once against the standard stays understandable to other tools and institutions instead of only to the team that gathered it.
Sanitation data is usually collected by whoever needs it next: a utility inventories its treatment plants, an NGO surveys household toilets, a regulator asks for figures in its own format. Each dataset is reasonable on its own and none of them add up, so nobody can say what happens to a city's faecal sludge end to end. A shared standard is what makes "collect once, reuse many times" possible along the whole service chain.
How to do it
Read the standard to see how assets along the sanitation chain are defined and related to each other.
Map the asset types you already track onto the standard's types, and note where your own categories are narrower or broader.
Collect or migrate your sanitation assets using those types so containment, emptying and treatment stay linked as a chain rather than as separate lists.
Use the Data Dictionary to confirm which fields exist for each asset type before designing forms around them.
Report against standard indicators so your figures can be compared with other programmes and with national reporting.