Keeping Inventory
While working on my insurance post, it made a lot of sense to pair it with something on inventory management so here’s a little detour to talk about how I inventory stuff. Keeping an inventory can be as simple as doing a walkthrough with a camera once a year or can be complex leveraging custom barcodes and NFC tags - or anywhere in between.
The easier systems are good to track big ticket items but you’re limited to items that are out in plain sight and that can be easily and specifically identified visually. You also run the risk that moving too fast, or bad lighting renders your inventory walkthrough less than helpful. On the other extreme, it’s a heck of a lot of work to do manual inventory management for what might be little day to day gain.
To each their own, but here’s what works for me!
Quick Links
Motivators
For most people, I imagine the desire to inventory their stuff comes up (briefly) when they look at home or renters insurance. For some couples, it may start out as a way to track “who owns what” during the initial stages of the relationship. Funny enough my original motivation for this was reading about all the insane deals you can find at estate sales. In my mind, I just pictured a grieving widow holding a yard sale and letting go of their former partner’s stuff at fire-sale prices because they didn’t have the domain knowledge to price things properly. I didn’t want to leave my spouse to walk into that unprepared.
And I’m certainly OCD enough to do this. Truthfully the hardest part is clearing out the backlog; once you’ve cleared out the majority of the backlog, it’s fairly easy to stay on top of the inventory provided you have a system that works for you. The system I’ve settled on over the years works well for insurance, estate planning and for warranty purposes.
What system to use?!
Any system is better than nothing — even if it’s just a journal you log serial numbers in. It’s something. There are tons of smartphone apps out there for inventory management and you can leverage things like Evernote or OneNote to build out your own homebrew system. To address this question we need to indirectly tackle the following:
What ‘rich’ data we need to capture?
For most people, I imagine at least some photos of the product would be nice
Do you need multiple photos? Would it be nice to have the photos staggered in blocks (i.e., 2015-photos, 2020-photos etc. to show ownership/condition over time)
Do you want to embed manuals, warranty policy information?
The initial purchase receipt would make sense to include; what about subsequent maintenance receipts?
How secure/reliable do you want it? How accessible?
Running it using a local repository can be more secure/reliable than relying on an online service that may or may not go away, be substantially changed or you might get locked out of. Of course this means now you need to worry about your own backups
Do you want to be primarily app-driven? These types of solutions tend to be easier to use and more accessible but certainly not as customizable
If you store it locally, you’ll need to manage backups for it. If you store it in the cloud, you’d still be wise to have backups but more so, you’ll need to track space usage. Depending on how rich your inventory is, this can get out of hand!
How many people need to interact with the system generally?
If one person is in charge of managing the inventory system, you can do whatever you need so long as the other can access it later
What custom fields do you need to track?
Do you want to track barcodes? MAC addresses?
Do you want to link password manager lookups? (i.e., to take you to the secured product registration page)
Do you want to make certain text elements linkable?
Do you want to attach contact info? (i.e., go -here- for service or talk to -someone- for more information)
In my case, I wanted extremely rich, embedded content that was templatable and I could leverage standardized formatting.
What I went with
Ultimately, I went with OneNote (desktop version). There’s a web version that is free to use but it has two major downsides: limited to 5GB in size before you have to pay and it’s featureset is currently, very limited (specifically with page templates).
Caution: long-term support for OneNote (desktop)
Microsoft has stated that they plan on supporting OneNote (desktop) until 2023 (mainstream support ) and 2025 (extended support). After that, all bets are potentially off. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use (or continue to use) OneNote, you’ll just need to plan for this eventuality. In my case, since I have the OneNote files locally, it’s easy enough to snapshot a virtual machine that can interact with the inventory either [a] forever or [b] until I find a better solution.
If I had to do it all over again, using something else (since OneNote desktop is on its way out)? I think I might use Google Drive; I’m sure there are templates out there for inventory management but even without, a collection of folders within Drive to organize it thematically (i.e., Kitchen, Workshop, Tech etc.). To organize photos, I would use Google Photo albums and just link it for each item.
My Template
In OneNote, you can build out your inventory form the way you like it to include whatever data you think is relevant. Once you’ve finished designing the page just the way you like it, you can save it as a template. There are a few things to note about templates:
For pages that you have created a template, there is no way to ‘push’ an update to the template — you will need to redo any changes to the template manually
If you want to backup/share your templates, the templates become individual pages in a OneNote file. The file is My Templates.one and it is located in %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates
You can set a template as the default page for a section! You will have to do this for each section though (although you could have a slightly different template for different sections)
As your inventory gets bigger and bigger, you may want to leverage section-groups — sadly, there is no way to assign a template to a section group
One nice thing you can do with OneNote is that you can right click on nearly anything - from a piece of text to an attachment to a page and create a link to that. This is handy if some of your items are bundles or kits i.e., a drill kit might include a drill, two individual batteries and a charger all of which might have their own inventory page but spread across different sections (i.e., power tools and batteries & chargers). This will allow you to link items that are related to each other, together.
This is an example of a product entry I might have: the nice thing about OneNote is that the pages can be very rich — I have URLs, images, PDFs and archives (containing product images) embedded on this page.
This template is pretty easy to build out — it’s just a bunch of freeform cells but if you want a jump start, you can use this exported page. Just open this .one file in OneNote and save the page as a template.
Closing Thoughts
Getting started is the hardest part of the inventory process: at first you don’t necessarily know what data fields you might want to collect down the road and the potential aggravation of having to update a template in the future might be discouraging. If you’re worried about that, do a few products to start with from a few different categories and let your brain sleep on it.
So one downside about using OneNote (desktop) is that you do need to think about backups — there’s no point in having all of your stuff neatly inventoried to just get it wiped out by data loss. OneNote has built-in backups, but don’t necessarily rely on those beyond only the very basics (as files can get corrupted!). One option is to lean in favor of the web-based OneNote (which comes with its own limits) but I would still advise caution.
As your inventory gets larger and you migrate from sections to section-groups and then multiple section groups, at some point, it makes sense to split even section groups out into their own individual OneNote-notebooks. Splitting notebooks up keeps the individual sizes down and reduces your risk from files getting corrupted.
If you regularly prune your OneNote notebooks down and take precautions to backup, you should be okay for quite some time. I’ve been following this process since 2014 or so — I started with a single OneNote notebook and as of time of writing, I have 20GB of inventory logs spread across seven notebooks.
