Feedback #2 — Develop a Stand-Alone Home Inventory Program Integrated with Quicken
Suggested title: Quicken Home Inventory — Stand-Alone Program with Quicken Integration
I would encourage Quicken to develop, or possibly acquire, a modern stand-alone home inventory program that could optionally integrate with Quicken Classic.
I emphasize stand-alone because a home inventory has uses quite different from accounting software. Users often need quick access to an inventory to find a serial number, receipt, warranty, appraisal, photograph, or other information without opening their complete Quicken financial file.
At the same time, integration with Quicken could make the inventory much more valuable by incorporating household property into Quicken's net-worth capabilities.
An excellent home inventory program in the past was Home Inventory Pro. Its developers eventually discontinued the product. Whether acquiring and restoring an existing program is practical is obviously a business decision for Quicken, but programs such as this demonstrate the usefulness of a comprehensive home inventory.
I suggest that a Quicken home-inventory product include:
- Organization by property, building, room, category, and individual item.
- Photographs and video.
- Purchase date, merchant, purchase price, model and serial numbers.
- Receipts, warranties, appraisals, manuals and other documents attached to individual items.
- Separate values for original cost, estimated current value, and replacement cost.
- Barcode or QR scanning where practical.
- Multiple residences, rental properties, storage facilities and other locations.
- Specialized handling of artwork, antiques, jewelry, coins and other collections.
- Appraisal histories.
- Warranty and maintenance reminders.
- Secure off-site/cloud backup.
- Insurance-loss reports containing photographs, descriptions, serial numbers, purchase information and replacement values.
- Estate-planning reports, including identification of intended recipients of particular property.
- PDF/print and spreadsheet export.
The program should be useful as an independent Quicken product, while Quicken Classic users could optionally synchronize appropriate values with their Quicken files.
This integration could also substantially improve Quicken's Net Worth reporting. Quicken could distinguish between:
Financial Net Worth — financial assets less liabilities.
Comprehensive Net Worth — financial net worth plus real estate, vehicles, household property, artwork, collections and other nonfinancial assets.
This could produce a true personal balance sheet showing cash, investments, retirement accounts, real estate, vehicles, household property and other assets against mortgages, loans, credit cards and other liabilities.
Ideally, every summarized amount could be expanded down to the individual accounts or inventoried property from which it was calculated.
Such a product would extend Quicken from managing a household's financial accounts to maintaining a much more complete record of the household's financial position and physical assets.
