Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 8 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

For years I’ve used the home inventory feature of Microsoft Money to track important items in the house, along with purchase dates, replacement amounts, serial numbers, etc. Even when, starting with Money 2005, it was no longer a supported piece of the application, I continued to use it just because I had so much information in there (and there was no easy way to get it out).

This week I came across a post on Lifehacker pointing to the Insurance Information Institute’s free Know Your Stuff home inventory application and decided to give it a shot. I liked what I saw, so I began the laborious process of manually re-entering all of my home inventory information into Know Your Stuff, copy/pasting from MS Money … but I think it was worth it.

KYS organizes your items by rooms: first you create the rooms of your house, then create the items in those rooms. You enter basic information like the item name, location (room), category, purchase date and price, serial number, descriptive information, etc. You can also attach a photo and/or receipt. Once you’ve done all the data entry, you can generate reports, or even export the data to Excel (in CSV format). If you want a secure, offsite backup solution for your inventory data, KYS integrates with Vault24.

Overall, I like the organization aspect of KYS. It has the flexibility to let me create my own rooms, and even asset types. I like how you can attach multiple photos of a room, but am a little frustrated you can only attach a single picture to an item. Also, for the receipt field, only images are allowed (no PDFs, which would seem to make more sense, especially for multi-page documents). The search function is a bit limited too, allowing you only to search on the item name (instead of say, Make or Model). As for secure backup, I’ll just put a copy of my inventory file in my Amazon S3 account for a lot cheaper than the $15/year fee for storing a single inventory file on Vault24. 😛

At least now I’ve got all of that information out of MS Money and into a separate application where I can do better reporting and easier updating.