You’re on the list

Do you back up your Mac? If a disaster takes out your hardware, will one of those polite guys from an insurance commercial appear, honoring your policy with a snap? Since that’s pure pipe dream, you’ll need to provide proof that you owned that computer—and any other items in your claim. Home Inventory provides the framework for you to catalog everything, even helping you keep track of the value of your items versus the maximum coverage of your policy. The software misses a few important options, but its simple interface and invaluable iPhone helper app make the giant task of inventorying your home manageable.

Home Inventory is designed to help you enter and retrieve property details as simply as possible. Don’t be put off by its bland looks; the software understands that you want to spend the minimum time on this process and doesn’t hang you up with fancy flair. Just begin by creating each room in the house where items might be—it’s helpful to divide your task into smaller parts. Pick or create an item type, such as DVD, computer software, or appliance, and begin logging.

Next to the automatic picture, we took a personal photo of Tartine to prove ownership in case it gets bruleéd.

The free iPhone helper app lets you move around your house, scanning bar codes on objects and harvesting their tasty basics into the Mac software. We tore through the entry of books, videogames, movies, and our other wares in about three seconds each. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can manually enter the barcode number and other details. But the entry process slows without bar codes—with electronics that left their boxes long ago, we took about 20–60 seconds per manual item, which adds up.

To prove ownership, Home Inventory stores photos of items in your home and can also catalog receipts as photos or file attachments. While you can use a built-in webcam—or shoot and save pictures with any camera—the iPhone app shines again. You can add pictures with just a few taps, speeding through the list in about three seconds per item.

In addition to helping get everything cataloged, Home Inventory manages that information as your life goes on. You can keep running notes about repairs or upgrades. Should you ever need to get at all of these details, the simple but useful reporting functions prepare lists. The software even stores basic details about your insurance policy and can compare your total coverage against the sum of each item’s value.

But while Home Inventory works well overall, it has a few shortcomings. It can only enter an item’s MSRP automatically, not the current sales price, which is probably a lot closer to what you originally paid. When adding photos with the iPhone app, you can’t automatically show only the items that need pictures; you’ll waste valuable seconds selecting items from a bigger list. And since it stores so many personal details, Home Inventory should protect you better. It can create backups locally, but its online backup only works with the end-of-life MobileMe. (The company says it’s adding alternatives.) And password protection only keeps someone from opening your files; it doesn’t encrypt the data.

The bottom line. Home Inventory can’t quite make cataloging your belongings fun, but it makes it manageable, even tossing in simple reports to retrieve that data later.