Binary Formations Home Inventory – Review

Home Inventory
Company: Binary Formations
Price: $19.99

Home Inventory for the Mac keeps an inventory of your valuables, storing important information about each item and making it easy to provide documentation for insurance claims in the event of loss or property damage. The app allows the addition of photos and receipts to identify, assess value, and provide proof of ownership.

Home Inventory runs on any Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later with at least 2.0 GB RAM. Hard drive requirements depends on the amount of information you store in your inventory. You have the option to build your inventory with your Mac or with the free Home Inventory Photo Remote app.

The Photo Remote is a free iOS helper app that allows you to quickly build an outline of your inventory. The app, available for iOS devices, can be used to add new categories, collections, locations, and items to your inventory. Using your home WiFi, Home Inventory Photo Remote connects to your Mac, allowing you to take photos or scan UPC, EAN, and ISBN barcodes of items throughout the house. You can later use the Mac to add details about the items.

For backup and restore of your inventory there is the free Home Inventory Mobile Backup helper app. This app allows you to view information and back up your inventory to an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch from Dropbox, WiFi, or through iTunes. The Mobile Backup app requires Home Inventory 3.2 or later with the Backup to Dropbox feature enabled for the Dropbox backups. Other features of the mobile app include:

• Support for multiple inventory files
• Password protection
• Browse items by category, collection or tag
• Searchable item list
• Email/share photos, receipts, and file attachments
• View insurance policy information

Free home inventory apps and online websites are available from most of the major insurance companies. There is a popular free web application by the Insurance Information Institute, Know Your Stuff, which securely encrypts and stores your inventory data online. All of these applications appear to have the same capabilities as Home Inventory:

• Catalog each item by category or room
• Allow Photos of belongings
• Add item by scanning item barcode for images and descriptions
• Importing photos from phone
• Add purchase price, date, and photos of receipts
• Track items in multiple properties or homes
• Report and browse gallery of your belongings
• Export inventory as a spreadsheet or PDF

Why purchase Home Inventory over the free apps? Home Inventory includes additional insurance features to assist in smooth and timely claims processing, as well as assess whether you are over-insured, under-insured, or have just the right amount of coverage. You can also generate reports of any items not covered by insurance. For security minded people, online security of the data will be a concern; especially considering the recent security breaches that have affected some major online services.

Home Inventory has a tiered local backup feature that allows you to save your data to your Mac’s hard drive, external hard drive, a USB drive or Dropbox. In addition to allowing backup and restore of inventory data to mobile devices, the Mobile Backup app allows you to view item information, photos, receipts, and image and PDF file attachments. In spite of all these features, the biggest selling point of Home Inventory is its ease of use. The Photo Remote app’s simple interface makes adding items room by room a quick and efficient process.

During my review of Home Inventory, I had issues connecting to my Home Inventory database on my MacBook Air using the Photo Remote app. This was mainly due to my WiFi network. After creating an computer-to-computer ad hoc network, I was then able to connect. However, I was informed that a beta version of Home Inventory is in the works that will eliminate the WiFi requirement.

Home Inventory, is worth the $19.99 price. The ease of use and full featured Mac application and free mobile apps makes this a smart way to insure that your property and its contents are inventoried as well as adequately insured.

MyMac Review Rating is 7 out of 10.