Home Inventory for iPhone review

We review Home Inventory for iPhone - a way of keeping track of your belongings

Taking inventory was only really something a business needed to do, and usually because the tax man was peeking over their shoulder. But these days we’ve got insurance companies to deal with, which will go to almost any length to avoid paying out should any of your stuff go missing or find itself damaged.

So many of us have collections kicking about the house nowadays, thanks mainly to the popularity and accessibility of eBay and David Dickinson, so keeping careful track of where everything is, where it came from and how much it cost is no bad thing.

Home Inventory is an app that’s here to make that task simpler and more accurate. Its purpose is undeniably focused on the home, but there’s actually no reason at all that a business couldn’t just as easily put Home Inventory to use in the workplace, and take some of the elbow grease out of stock taking time.

The digitisation of your possessions begins with a category. The app comes with a host of the most useful labels, such as computer equipment, clothing, books, collectibles, furniture and so forth, but you can add and remove as many custom categories as you like.

It’s here where you’ll decide whether Home Inventory is to be for personal use or business, since those categories could just as easily be products in a shop or on your workshop shelves.

A new item is then added to said categories, and its information entered. This includes a description, make and model, serial number (another useful aspect for businesses and shops), quantity, location and a whole bunch of other attributes. Again, you can add custom fields to the item listing, should there be something specific you want to record.

You can also keep track of the price you paid or what something’s worth, along with the date it was purchased, should the library of household items ever be used for an insurance claim..

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you can add pictures to each item’s listing. These can be taken directly using the iPhone’s camera, or you can add them to the listing from the camera roll (which, naturally, you can save images to from the web, email attachments or wherever else).

Home Inventory can then begin to build your database of possessions and present you with summary or detailed PDF reports based on either category or location. These are rich reports, complete with pictures, and a great way to make a paper version of the inventory should you desire.

Although Home Inventory lacks the barcode reading capabilities many of its rivals include, it does have another strong feature that few such apps can boast: online access. Once you’ve registered your free Home Inventory account, you can access it through any web browser, which is then synchronised with the app.

Again, this could prove invaluable for businesses, where more than one app user might want to keep track of—and edit—an inventory. Log into the same account, either through any of the iDevices or through the web browser, and you can all work from the same slate.

Once your inventory has been populated it feels like a very worthwhile exercise, even if keeping track of all your particulars has never been a priority before. And Home Inventory is about as complete and user-friendly as any stock taking app you’ll find out there.

If it gets a 2D bar code generator and reader added to its feature list, this would be utterly essential for any home or business owner.

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