Feature: Inventory Tracker

[keinzufall85-neo]

First and foremost, this is a really great suite of tools! I stumbled upon Yuvomi in between developing my own inventory (smartphones, notebooks, electrical devices, potentially - cds, vinyl, etc.) and subscription tracker (streaming services, gas/water/electricity, insurances). I looked at Family Wall, which lacked some of the inventory features and was too premium/SaaS and Memento Database, which was somehow to sandbox-y for me. So happy I found this! :)

Description

With a family, I often find myself organizing tons of things (in a physical sense). Smartphones, tablets, notebooks, bikes, scooters, etc. and I usually track those in an excel file to keep necessary information about it at hand (for example when reselling or deciding if a replacement is already justified). Recently I also inherited a vinyl collection for which I, kind of, did the same.

Proposed Solution

An Inventory Tracker module could hold those inventory items:

• item name
• item description
• buying price
• buying price
• current market value (I'm undecided on this one as its manual work and would often be stale)
• in-family owner
• comment
• stack name (if it's more then one of the same, could be stacked like in the Pantry module?)

Maintenance could look like this:

• Item should be CRUDable in the module.
• Budget module should hold an optional flag, allowing for a spending to be created as a linked item in inventory as well
• Items could be linked to existing spendings (one, or many if it's a loan or something? like with a car for example)

It's just an idea, so happy to discuss or maybe get pointed to a way this is already possible in Yuvomi today!

[ulsklyc]

Thanks, and thanks especially for asking whether it already exists, because that is the question worth answering first.

It does not, and the module that looks closest is the wrong one. Pantry has quantity, location, category and stacking, so on a field list it looks like two thirds of your request. But it is built around consumption and expiry: it asks what is running out and what goes off. An inventory asks what something cost, who in the family owns it, and whether replacing it is justified yet. Those are different questions about the same shelf, and bending Pantry to answer both would give you a module that is confusing in both roles. So no, there is no way to do this in Yuvomi today, and I would rather say that than point you at a workaround that falls apart at the vinyl collection.

Your field list is well chosen. Two remarks:

• Current market value: your own instinct is right, leave it out. A number nobody updates is worse than no number, because it looks authoritative on the day you need it most.
• The budget link is the interesting part, and there is precedent: attaching a receipt to a transaction shipped in v1.67.0, and it works both ways round, so linking an item to one or several transactions is a pattern the codebase already knows. Your loan example, where several payments belong to one object, is exactly what that link shape supports.

What I am not deciding today is whether this becomes an eighteenth module. That is a product decision, not an engineering one: every module is a permanent line item in the navigation for every household, including the ones that will never track a bike. The alternative worth weighing is a smaller shape, ownership and purchase data attached to things that already exist, which covers less than your spreadsheet but costs every other user nothing.

I am leaving this open as the reference for that decision rather than closing it, and I am not going to pretend it is next. #714 asks for something related from the grocery side, which is a useful data point about where the demand actually sits.

[ulsklyc]

Decided, and I am recording it here because I left this open as the reference for it.

Inventory becomes a module, and it ships off by default. @keinzufall85-neo built it while this discussion was still open (#741), and the code answered the engineering half convincingly: it extends the existing reminder system rather than standing a second one next to it, and the test chain is properly wired.

The half I actually left open was the navigation cost, and that one is solved rather than outvoted. The module arrives disabled and each household switches it on. Nobody who will never track a bike gets an eighteenth entry after an update, and the households that came here from a spreadsheet turn it on once.

One thing worth naming for anyone reading this later: your own instinct about the current-value field was right, and it stayed out. The full reasoning and the remaining conditions are in #741.

[ulsklyc]

Shipped in v2.13.0, built by @keinzufall85-neo in #741 - a hundred-plus commits and three rounds of review, all of it their work.

Inventory tracks what the household owns: brand, model, serial number, storage location, purchase price and date, warranty length, condition, status and an optional photo. Receipts and manuals link in from Documents, purchases and repairs from Budget, and warranty ends plus your own tracked dates (service, inspection, insurance) become reminders and a subscribable ICS feed.

It is the first module that ships switched off. That was the open question in this thread: every module is a permanent line item in the navigation of every household, including the ones that will never track a bike. Switch it on under Settings → Navigation.

Closing as done. Later stages are already sketched in the PR; open a new discussion for anything specific you want from them.