The inventory you hope you never need.
After a fire, a flood, or a burglary, the insurer asks what you had. The honest answer is that nobody knows, because nobody has ever had a reason to write it down. That question is much easier to answer from photographs taken on an ordinary Tuesday.
You will be asked to list it from memory
Days after the worst day of your year, on a form, from a hotel room, with none of the objects in front of you.
A photo of a room is not a photo of a thing
A wide shot of the living room establishes that a television existed. It does not establish which one, or what was in the cupboard beneath it.
The record has to survive the house
A notebook in the kitchen drawer burns with the kitchen drawer. So does the laptop it was on.
Building the record
One room at a time, on separate evenings
Whole-house documentation is a project nobody finishes. A single cupboard is fifteen minutes, and a half-finished inventory is worth enormously more than none.
Photograph the contents, not the container
Open the cupboard, pull the drawer out, and shoot what is actually in it. Smart Scan turns that into an itemised list, which is the part an assessor wants and the part you would never type by hand.
Put serials and model numbers where you would look for them
There is no dedicated serial field. Use the description or a tag. Both are free text and both come out in the export.
Export, and keep a copy off the premises
Any bin exports to CSV. Email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage, hand it to a relative. A record stored only in the building it documents is not a record.
What you’d lean on
Multiple photos per item
The object, and then the label on the back of it. Photos are the evidence; the text is just the index into them.
CSV export
Name, description, quantity, minimum quantity, barcode, tags, bin, room, and location: the same columns from the app and the web dashboard.
Room and location on everything
“Where was it kept” is a question loss adjusters ask, and it is recorded here as a matter of course rather than as an extra step.
Self-hosting
The whole inventory can run against your own NAS if you would rather a record of your possessions did not live on somebody else’s servers.
What this is, and what it is not
Bin by Bin records what you owned, how many there were, where they were kept, and what they looked like. That is the evidential half of a home inventory, and it is the half that is impossible to reconstruct after the fact.
It is not a valuation tool. There is no replacement-value field, no purchase-price field, no depreciation, and no total at the bottom. The export has no money column in it, because the app has no money in it. If you need a schedule of values for a specific policy, you will be pairing this record with your own figures or with a professional appraisal.
We would rather say that plainly than let the word “insurance” imply a feature that is not there. The photographs are the thing a valuation gets built on, and they are the thing that stops existing the moment the house does.
No values, no serial field
An item has a name, description, tags, barcode, quantity, and photos. If you want a purchase price or a serial number in the record, put it in the description or a tag; it will export, but nothing will total it or track it as a number.
Questions
- Does it store replacement values?
- No. There is no monetary field anywhere in the app and nothing is summed. You can write a figure into an item’s description and it will appear in the CSV export as text, but the app will not treat it as a value.
- Exactly what is in the export?
- A CSV with the columns Name, Description, Quantity, Min Quantity, Barcode, Tags, Bin, Room, Location: one row per item, UTF-8 with a byte-order mark so accented characters survive Excel. Photos are not embedded in the CSV; they stay in the app.
- How are the photos stored?
- Photo storage is private. Images are never served from a public bucket. The apps fetch them through short-lived signed links that expire in minutes.
- Can I keep the whole thing off the cloud?
- Yes. The same app runs against a self-hosted backend on your own NAS, in which case the photos and the database are on hardware you own and nothing leaves your network.
- How much of the house do I need to do for this to be worth anything?
- Less than you would think. Claims tend to founder on the contents of cupboards and boxes rather than on the furniture, because the furniture is the part you can still describe. Start with the storage, not the living room.
Start with one bin.
The whole house is a daunting project. One shelf is a photo.
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