Two Home Inventory Tracking Apps to Insure Your Assets
After you have been established in a home, apartment, condo, or workplace for an extended period of time, loads of purchases and other assets begin to build-up. Home inventory tracking can become very difficult as receipts get lost and remembering what something cost is almost an impossibility.
So, when something gets stolen or damaged and you’d like to report a claim to your insurance company, pulling out a record of the purchase isn’t likely going to happen. It is going to end up being your word against theirs.
In order to help remedy keeping track of your multitude of assets, I am here today to talk about online home inventory tracking tools, one online and one off. They are designed specifically for situations like I described. To track your entire home inventory, including photos of receipts, credit cards, tax documents and much more.
StuffSafe – Online
StuffSafe is a completely free home inventory tracking site that lets you track every asset in every room of your home or workplace. You can separate all of these items by room, track many different items of your purchase, along with attaching photos of receipts, or the actual product.
Once you have all of your items entered, there are also advanced reporting options, to Excel, HTML or PDF.
Here is a look at my empty inventory database on StuffSafe.
Here I am entering the first of many assets into my StuffSafe database. These items can include many details, and also photographs, which you cannot see on this screen.
StuffSafe includes advanced export options for you to display to your insurance provider, or just for safe keeping of a hard copy report.
KnowYourStuff – Offline
KnowYourStuff has many of the same features as StuffSafe, but is offline. In other words, it’s home inventory software which keeps it away from possible snoops in the cloud. It includes a room-by-room inventory as well, with item descriptions, photos and cost.
It does not however include any reporting option like StuffSafe.
KnowYourStuff also includes a nice search tool, for sifting through the dozens of items in your database.
One of the bonus options that it has is an online ‘vault’ to store your database for safekeeping. (Vault 24 is not free though, but comes at a nominal fee)
Below is what you’ll see at first glance in KnowYourStuff. Here you will create your new location, your rooms, and item additions.
Here is a look at an addition of a new item to the KnowYourStuff database. I’m adding the same TV that I added in StuffSafe. Here you can see that you have many of the same options, including photos for receipts.
Trying to keep track of all of the thousands of purchases you’ve made during your lifetime can be a daunting task. And you don’t really know how important it is, until you have something damaged or stolen. Without evidence, such as a receipt or photograph of your product, most insurance companies aren’t going to help you out. Free asset tracking tools like these keeps all of your things in a nice and organized fashion and makes life easier when you need to get it replaced in an emergency.
Try both of these out and let us know what you think. How do you keep track of your proof of purchases? Do you have your own methods? Please let us know, we’d love to hear about them.
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It is better to complete a walk through of your home with a video camera. You can add voice over commentary regarding special individual items. You can zoom in a manufacturer’s information on a-v equipment, computers, etc. Make multiple copies and store off site away from your home. Most people do not have the ambition to catalog their whole home via data entry.
Agreed, but would you want to have to refer to a video every time you’d like to look something up? Probably depends on your insurance provider.
Several problems with this. First, I’m not going to upload anything of value to a site that doesn’t have some measure of security (https). And I doubt I’m going to upload a copy of my last tax return along with a xerox of my birth certificate to any place on the internets. I agree with doing the video walk-through. You can catalog everything with video or pictures.
“Agreed, but would you want to have to refer to a video every time you’d like to look something up? Probably depends on your insurance provider.”
Disagreed. How often do you have to hunt down the serial number on the back of your 61″ Toshiba? Not very often unless you get broken into monthly cause you live in the ghetto.
Take the video or pics. Multiple copies. Leave one at work, maybe one with a relative and maybe in a safe-deposit box if you have one. Done.
Well, I guess we’ll just leave it up to personal preference. I think both options will work for just about anyone. If you aren’t comfortable publishing your personal information online, so be it.
I’m just giving you a couple of ways to do it.
I often need to look up data on my things, they get broken and the extensive guarantee in Norway makes it possible to complain and get it paid for by the manufacturer.
but I miss something tremendously. I need a program where I both register my belongings and can follow up changes, painting them, data on colour aso, new floor, walls, the maintenance of the house itself. It is a bother to register things by value in one plase and all over again somewhere else about other things sometimes even another. I need a program to work with on my house and belongings.
I think these are great tools for people to use. I know a family who’s house burned down a few years ago. They had to sit and write down all the stuff they owned. If they had this type of information already recorded, they would not have had to go through such a painful and sad process while going through an emotional situation. I am going to give one of these a try. I dont think I’d put anything personal, but entering products is fine with me.
Agree, when it comes to insurance in particulat I’d do both. First take a quick tour of the house with camera and then write down all of the valuable/expensive items.