Home Inventory Mac App Review
Create a home inventory to protect your belongings.
Enter Home Inventory. Quicken used to include a home inventory as part of Quicken for Mac (and PC for that matter); they dropped it completely for the Mac, and issued it as a stand-along product for the PC (at $30). Binary Formations' Home Inventory is a great replacement - faster, more flexible, universal binary, and actively developed. 'I've looked into inventory management software options costing thousands of dollars to start up that weren't capable of doing what I'm able to do with your guys' app. I have also been blown away by your customer service'. Scott Solberg. HVAC Technician. ROCK Mechanical.
Disaster can strike when you least expect it. That’s why you can never be too careful or too prepared when it comes to protecting your home and personal belongings. Homeowners insurance is a must for anyone who purchases a home. If properly covered, your property can be replaced should disaster strike your home.
Free Inventory Software Mac
One fatal flaw many homeowners make is underinsuring their belongings. After all, it can be difficult to estimate the value of a quilt your Grandmother made 20 years ago. This is where creating a home inventory can be helpful.
A home inventory is a detailed collection of information about the items in your home. It includes descriptions in writing, photographs and even video of your personal belongings as well as the structure of your home. When created properly, a home inventory can even assist you in the sale of your home, if you use it to also store maintenance records. The information in your inventory can be used to file a claim with your insurance company, or as proof of ownership in the event of theft.
Creating a home inventory can be a difficult process as it involves a lot of documentation. Some people utilize spreadsheet programs, like Numbers or Excel, or simply create a word processing document. While these methods can work, they aren’t as precise as Home Inventory for Mac, an app that is specifically built for creating a home inventory.
Home Inventory for Mac was developed by Binary Formations, LLC, which recently updated the app to version 3.0 on March 1, 2013. Some of the features of the app include:
- Customizable fields, field layouts, locations, categories and collections
- Built-in currency conversion
- Dated notes
- Tracking and valuing collections
- Cloud storage via Dropbox
- Robust and flexible reporting options
- Password protection
- Data import and export
- Tracking property assessments
- Warranty expiration reporting
- Multiple backup options
While Home Inventory lives on your desktop or laptop computer, you can keep track of your belongings with your mobile devices through the free helper apps, Home Inventory Photo Remote and Home Inventory Mobile Backup. With Home Inventory Photo Remote, you can use your mobile device to walk through your home to collect digital images of your property. Home Inventory Mobile Backup allows you to view your collection on the go as well as keep a backup of the inventory on your mobile device. Should your primary collection become corrupt or get deleted, you can restore it from your mobile device.
My favorite option within Home Inventory is the ability to go paperless. As much as I love technology, I do still rely on paper an awful lot. But, when it comes to warranty information, manuals, serial numbers, model numbers, I would much rather keep my personal belongings in a digital database. It’s much easier and less time consuming to search through a database for information when you need to replace something like a television or computer.
Windows Home Inventory Apps
One of the features I mentioned earlier as a possible option for a home inventory was maintenance records. Well, Home Inventory for Mac includes that one of its main features. You can create a schedule of routine home maintenance tasks. You can also add maintenance tasks to your calendar and reminders on your Mac.
While it might be a bit cumbersome to input the information the first time, it is well worth it and using Home Inventory for Mac to create your home inventory makes the process easy and ensures that your property information will be complete.
Home Inventory for Mac retails for $19.99 through the Mac App Store. The quality of the app is well-worth the price and the companion mobile apps are free to download in the iTunes App Store.
Apps make home inventory process painless.
Home Inventory for Mac and its companion iOS applications fill a very specific need, which is to meticulously inventory all of your belongings in case you should ever have to file an insurance claim to replace them. Though you can surely do this without Home Inventory, from my experience, I think the application is a worthwhile investment (both in buying the app and the time it takes to use it).
When I was a senior in high school, my best friend’s house caught fire. The fire started in the room next to hers, so though the house was mostly okay, nothing of hers survived. Like me, she had a massive collection of books and losing all of them was one of the worst parts of the whole ordeal. From then on, she kept a minutely detailed log of everything, just in case something like that would happen again. I started cataloging my books as well (with her enthusiastic help).
Beyond books, Home Inventory works with the idea of knowing what you have and compiles all the necessary tools together in one convenient place. With it, you can keep track of your appliances, furniture, tech, art, and personal belongings with photographs, receipts, info logs, and files of warranties and manuals. You can then match up your inventory against your insurance policies to make sure everything is covered. It’s relatively easy to input all this information, too, with the options of using the iOS companion app, Remote Entry, to add to your inventory from your phone. I was recently able to review the latest release of the app, version 3.5, which feature two huge updates – Home Inventory Inbox and Photo Entry Mode. With the Home Inventory Inbox you can send receipts for online purchases to the app from email, a web browser, or other apps and they will be stored until you are ready to organize them. Photo Entry Mode allows you to add items quickly from your iPhone, iPad, or even the iPod Touch. Photo mode also incorporates dictation as an input method.
I particularly liked using Remote Entry in conjunction with Home Inventory, as it made it much easier to add photos and update entries around the house without having to run back and forth to my workstation. You can even use the app to scan barcodes on your items so you don’t have to input all the information manually. The one downside to this is that you have to have a certain window open in Home Inventory in order to do a remote entry. You can add things to the iOS app offline, but there isn’t a way to permanently sync the two applications that I’ve found.
Remote Entry isn’t the only tool available to Home Inventory, however. There are also the iOS app, Mobile Backup, and a print plugin that allows you to send receipts to Home Inventory from your email, browser, or other applications.
Really, Home Inventory makes the entire process pretty painless. Its user guide offers some helpful tips on the process to make use of the app as streamlined as possible.
DOWNLOAD – iOS – FREE
DOWNLOAD – MAC – $24.99
Home Inventory Mac App Reviews
For more information, visit binaryformations.com.
Find Binary Formations on Facebook and Twitter.