For insurance
A contents inventory in the shape insurers ask for
A single total is not the number that matters. Contents policies are written with a separate limit for each category of thing, and that is where people find out they were underinsured.
Why per-category totals matter
Knowing you own $47,000 of things tells you almost nothing. Knowing that $12,400 of it is computers, $6,000 is jewellery and $3,200 is power tools tells you whether each of those sits under the limit your policy sets for it. A category limit is the one that quietly caps a claim.
Asset Fox totals your insured items by category, largest first, because the largest is the one most likely to be short. The same figures print as a schedule you can send to a broker.
What the schedule contains
- Sum insured by category, with a grand total.
- Every item behind each figure - make, model, serial number, room and purchase date.
- A note saying which values came from a receipt and which are estimates, because an insurer treats those differently.
- Anything on the schedule with no value recorded, called out rather than quietly totalled as zero.
Deciding what to insure
Anything over $500 is flagged automatically - you can change that figure, or answer any item yourself, and your answer sticks whatever the price turns out to be. The threshold is a starting point, not a rule.
After a loss
The value of an inventory is not in having it, it is in having it somewhere else. Print the schedule, keep a copy off the premises, and the conversation with a loss adjuster starts from a list with serial numbers on it rather than from memory.
Read next: building the inventory itself.