Home Inventory
Listing your belongings just got a bit easier
$24.99 Developer Binary Formations, binaryformations.com Requirements OS X 10.7.4 or later, 64-bit processor
When you buy a house, the first thing your insurance agent will recommend is taking an inventory of household items as additional protection in the event of loss or theft – which can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before.
With the release of Home Inventory 3.5, there are no more excuses. That’s because this already excellent Mac application has added two major tools to its arsenal that make it easier than ever to catalog the contents of your entire house in record time.
The first is a free print plugin which aids in moving digital receipts stored in other applications, such as Mail, to Home Inventory’s new Inbox (you can also import files via drag-and-drop).
From there, simply fill out a few item details, add it to your catalog, and quickly move on to the next item. The only downside is there’s no automatic text recognition to fill out the data for you, but since many of our purchases are made online these days, this method helps speed up the process.
The second convenience comes by way of a free iOS companion app called Home Inventory Remote Entry.
With the main app open on your Mac and on the same Wi-Fi network as your iPhone or iPad, users can roam around the house grabbing photos of everything in sight, which are uploaded directly to the existing catalog.
This can all be done without typing a single word, thanks to voice dictation. Just say the name of the item, state a keyword such as Category, Location, or Price, then tell it the information to add to that field. It gets even easier with new items, since you can simply scan the UPC or EAN code before you even open the box.
Otherwise, Home Inventory is well thought-out and easy to use. Items are assigned to specific locations of your choosing, but can be sorted into your own virtual collections as well.
There’s also a Home Inventory Mobile Backup app available that allows iOS users to carry catalogs with them wherever they go; however, Wi-Fi backup failed to work for us, and Dropbox sync was unintuitive and a little half-baked for our liking.
the bottom line. Home Inventory is a versatile, affordable way to keep tabs on everything you own in one place, with a pair of new features that make it easier than ever to do that.