The Best Apps for Creating a Home Insurance Inventory

It's best to be prepared.

  • Share
  • Read Later

No one wants to dwell on the negative, but if a disaster strikes—whether in the form of a wildfirehurricane, or something else entirely—it’s best to be prepared. The biggest step you can take toward being prepared is creating a home inventory, which will help you get reimbursement from your insurance company for any lost possessions. Having a detailed inventory makes it easier to file an insurance claim and will help your claim get processed quickly.

A good home inventory will include a detailed list of your belongings, including descriptions, photos or video, receipts, serial numbers, date of purchase, value—and any other information that could help prove what you have and what it’s worth. You should inventory all big ticket items, like electronics and furniture, but it’s also important to take inventory of smaller things that could need replacing in the event of a disaster, like clothes and dishes. And whenever you buy something new, be sure to update your inventory so it’s always current. Still not sure where to start? This checklist from State Farm (PDF) gives you a good outline of inventory basics.

Collecting all of that information may sound like a daunting task, but fortunately there’s tech that can help: cloud services will keep your data accessible wherever you need it and apps can make creating your home inventory a snap.

Check with your insurance company first

allstate-digital-locker-web-300px

AllState Digital Locker

Before you get started with your inventory, you should check with whichever company provides your home or renter’s insurance. If they have any specific reimbursement requirements, it’s important to be aware of them for your inventory. Your insurance company may also have their own tools you can make use of—and you may find it more convenient to use an insurance-provided tool that will be sure to collect any specialized data your insurance company might need. Best of all: these tools tend to be free, even if you don’t hold an account with the company.

If you’re with one of these insurance companies, they have great app offerings that will handle all of your inventory needs:

The best digital home inventory service

know-your-stuff-iphone-300px

Know Your Stuff

Know Your Stuff is a free online inventory service provided by the Insurance Information Institute. The site will walk you through configuring rooms in your home and listing the items, complete with photos and receipts for documentation. Because the site walks you through everything you need to enter, you can be sure you’re recording all of the right information. And everything is stored online, so you have easy access to your home inventory from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Even though an online service makes things easier than keeping an inventory on paper, it can still be frustrating to have to photograph all of your possessions and attach those photos one by one to your inventory. To simplify things, Know Your Stuff also has a free app for iPhone and Android phones. Using the app, you can modify or add to your online inventory—and easily add photos directly from your phone.

Though there are plenty of options available here, Know Your Stuff has the most comprehensive toolset that’s available on the web or your mobile device, which makes it our pick for the best digital home inventory service.

Don’t want to learn a new app?

If you don’t feel like learning an entirely new piece of software to get your home inventory done, that’s fine. You can make a home inventory with plenty of different applications—all you really need is a document listing items, values, and serial numbers as well as a place to store photos of your stuff.

Here are a couple of common applications that could pull double duty to manage your home inventory—but if you aren’t already using these apps for something else, using Know Your Stuff will probably be the easiest way to go.

We’ve given you a few great options for creating your home inventory. So if you don’t have a home inventory, put it on your short list. And whichever service you choose, be sure to be comprehensive and keep it up to date—you’ll be glad you did if you’re ever faced with filing a claim.

This article was written by Elizabeth Harper and originally appeared on Techlicious.
More from Techlicious: