The inventory system

How it actually works

The whole system rests on one small habit and one small sticker. Here is the mechanism underneath it, including the parts it cannot do.

One sticker per box

A quarter-sized sticker with a chip in it, no battery, holding nothing but a web address. The address points at that box in your ledger. Hold a phone near it and the page opens.

Because the sticker holds only an address, the record itself lives in the ledger where it can be searched, backed up, and read from any device. The tag is a doorknob. The room is somewhere safer.

Start to finish

The four moments

A piece of furniture passes through the studio four times. The system only asks something of you at the first one.

A delivery lands

Receiving

Two minutes at the tailgate, while the box is still in your hands.

1
Open Log a delivery on your phone and name it. Hartwell primary bedroom lighting.
2
Type what came: four sconces, one flush mount, the vendor, what each cost. Photos count too, and a photo of the packing slip is often faster than typing.
3
Say which building it is going to and which rack or wall.
4
Assign it to a client project, or leave it as studio stock if the packing slip is missing.
5
Hold a blank tag to the back of your phone. It becomes this box. Peel it, stick it on the lid.

Straight answer

This step is the one that costs you something. It is about two minutes per box, and it only works if it happens at the tailgate rather than later. Everything else the system does is free once this is done.

It goes on a shelf

Storing

The box knows where it belongs. You tell it when that changes.

1
The box page shows its building and its zone, so it goes back in the same place every time.
2
When you move it between the house and the warehouse, tap the tag and press Move. One button.
3
The ledger updates everywhere at once, so the dashboard and the project page already know.
4
A box nobody has opened since it arrived is flagged on the dashboard until someone confirms what is in it.

Straight answer

The tag has no battery and no GPS. It cannot tell the system it has been moved. You press the button. That is the one habit the whole thing rests on, and it is why Move is a single tap rather than a form.

You need one thing

Finding

The question is usually not which box. It is do I already own this.

1
Search reaches inside the boxes, not just the labels. Type brass and it finds a single pull in a bin in the garage.
2
Search a vendor, a fabric, a finish, a room, or a client name.
3
Filter to one building when you are standing in it, or to one project when you are pulling for it.
4
Studio stock is its own view, so you can check what you already have before placing an order.

Straight answer

Search only knows what was typed in at receiving. A box logged as one unopened carton will be found as one unopened carton. The system is honest about what it does not know, which is why unopened boxes get flagged rather than quietly counted.

Install day

Installing

Pull the project and everything it needs is already gathered.

1
The project page lists every box tied to that client and which building each one is in.
2
If they are split across two buildings, it says so, with the countdown to the install date.
3
Load the truck against the list. Tap each tag as it goes on to check it off.
4
Take three of the eight pillows and leave five. Pull the three on the box page and the count follows.
5
Mark items installed as they land in the house. What comes back becomes a return with its own deadline.

Straight answer

Partial pulls are the part most inventory tools get wrong. A box is rarely all or nothing, so items move individually while the box stays where it is.

Before you ask

The questions worth asking

What is the tag, physically?: A paper-thin sticker about the size of a quarter with a small chip in it. No battery, nothing to charge, nothing to replace. They cost roughly a quarter each, so tagging a hundred boxes is a rounding error, and your first batch is included.
Does anyone need to install an app?: No. Every iPhone since the XR and effectively every Android reads these natively. Hold the phone near the tag and the box page opens in the browser by itself. Someone helping you load a truck for one afternoon can use it without being set up first.
What if the warehouse has no signal?: Box pages you have opened before stay readable without a connection, and anything you change while offline syncs the moment you have signal again. A box you have never opened on that phone does need a connection the first time. If the warehouse is genuinely dead, the printed code on every label still tells you which box you are holding.
What if a tag gets torn off or ruined?: Every label also carries the box code printed in plain text and a square code your camera can read. Search the code, print a new label, hold a blank tag to your phone, and that box is tagged again in under a minute. Nothing is lost, because the record lives in the ledger rather than on the sticker.
Can someone else do the receiving?: Yes. You can invite helpers with their own logins. They can log deliveries, move boxes and check off a load, and you decide whether they see costs.
Can my clients see any of it?: Only what you choose to share, project by project. The default is that they see nothing. Vendor costs and studio stock are never client-visible.
What happens to everything I already have in boxes?: We start with what is staged for active projects rather than the whole warehouse, so you get the benefit in the first week. The rest gets tagged as you touch it. A box you never open again was not costing you anything to begin with.
What if I stop working with you?: Everything in the ledger exports to a spreadsheet whenever you want, and the accounts are in your name from the first day. You would be leaving with your data, not asking for it back.

Underneath

What it is built on

The same stack I run every dashboard on. A real database rather than a spreadsheet, backed up nightly, reachable from any phone or laptop, with logins per person. Nothing here is a plugin sitting on top of a website builder, which is why it can do things a website builder cannot.

Every account is in your name from the first day, and everything in the ledger exports to a spreadsheet whenever you want it.

Go press on it

Everything described here is clickable in the demo. Open a box, search for brass, log a pretend delivery and watch it hand you a tag.

Open a box See the proposal