Getting Started with Vaultli

1. The Core Architecture & Your Profile

Before you catalog a single item, it helps to understand how Vaultli actually organizes your data. Everything you own lives inside one consistent three-level structure, and every other feature in the app — filtering, valuation, the Marketplace, exports — is built on top of it.

The Hierarchy: Collections → Groups → Items

At the top level are Collections — broad categories like Music Media, Guitars & Basses, or Amplifiers. These appear in the left sidebar under Collections and are the main unit the rest of the app organizes around (each has its own schema, default view, and dashboard rollup).

Many Collections are further broken into Groups — sub-categories that share the parent's schema but let you segment a large Collection logically. In the screenshot below, Amplifiers is split into Combos, Heads, Rack Mount, Cabinets, and Speakers, each with its own item count.

At the bottom of the hierarchy are Items — the actual physical objects you own, each one a single record with its own specs, photos, financials, and ownership status.

Configuring System Preferences

Your account-wide preferences live under Settings → App Preferences. From there you can currently configure:

• Color Scheme — Light, Dark, or System, which automatically follows your operating system's own theme setting.
• Default View States — the layout each Collection opens in (Rich Card Grid, Dense Grid, or Detail Table) is set per-category in the Category Schema & Layout Editor covered in Chapter 2, and the Global Discover Marketplace has its own independent default view setting in App Preferences.
• Status Colors — the color swatch associated with each ownership status (Owned, Wishlist, Sold, and so on) can be customized per-status, with a one-click reset back to the defaults.

Cloud Sync States, Explained

The small sync icon in the top toolbar tells you, at a glance, whether your local changes have made it to the cloud. Hover over it at any time to see the exact status in a tooltip:

That local cache is your browser's own storage — so a closed tab or a temporary network drop never blocks data entry. As soon as connectivity returns, queued changes flush to the cloud automatically and the icon returns to green.

2. Schemas, Fields & Form Customization

Every Collection's data-entry form is generated from a schema — an ordered list of fields, grouped into sections, that determines exactly what you're asked to fill in and how it's displayed afterward. Understanding schemas is the single most valuable thing to learn early, because it's what makes Vaultli feel purpose-built for whatever you collect.

System Fields vs. Custom Fields

System fields — Brand, Model, Serial Number, Year, Condition, Source, Purchase Date, Current Value, Notes, and similar — exist on every item in every Collection, using the exact same underlying key every time. That consistency is what anchors global reporting: the Dashboard can total your entire portfolio's value, a CSV export has stable column names, and cross-category search works at all, precisely because these fields never change shape from one Collection to the next.

Custom fields are the opposite by design: scoped to a single Collection, so you can capture the deep, specific detail a general-purpose schema never could — a "Pressing Type" and "Disc Size / Speed" for vinyl records, or "Pickup Configuration" for a guitar. This is where Vaultli stops being a generic spreadsheet and starts being a real catalog for your specific hobby.

The Category Schema & Layout Editor

Open it from Settings → Collections → [your category] → Edit Layout. Every field — system or custom — is listed as a row where you control its type, its dropdown options (if any), and its visibility independently across your own Collection view and the Marketplace.

Making a Collection Fit: Required and Optional Fields

The Built-in System Fields list in the Layout Editor is split into two groups. The top group is Required by Vaultli: Brand, Model, Quantity, the purchase and valuation fields and the like. They are always on because reports, totals and sync depend on them. Below the divider bar are the optional fields (Serial / Unique ID, Year, Location, Acquired As, Country, Condition and Source, plus Color / Finish and Weight where a collection has them). Each has a Used box. Untick it and the field disappears from the item form and the Data Sheet for this collection, and its Tile / Grid / Table / Marketplace boxes are greyed out. Nothing you already typed is deleted; tick it again and it returns.

Two built-in collections show how far this stretches. Software keeps the normal purchase and value fields but turns off Condition, Color / Finish and Weight, and relabels Serial as License Key / Serial. Subscriptions relabels Brand and Model as Provider and Plan, drops the asset fields entirely, and adds its own billing fields. Same engine, very different forms. Use them as models for your own collections.

Renaming Fields with Aliases

Every system field — Brand, Model, Year, Serial Number, and Notes — can carry an alias: a per-category display label that replaces the generic name on the item form and throughout that Collection's views, without changing the underlying field or breaking cross-category reporting described above. This is what lets one consistent data model feel purpose-built for wildly different collections. A few examples already shipped as sensible defaults:

• In Music Media, Brand becomes Artist / Band / Label.
• In Books & Magazines, Brand becomes Publisher, Model becomes Book Title, Year becomes Publication Year, and Serial Number becomes ISBN / Barcode.
• In Artwork & Sculptures, Model becomes Title of Work.

To set or change one, open the Layout Editor for the category (Settings → Collections → [your category] → Edit Layout) and look for the Field Aliases controls alongside the field list. The Notes field is a special case: it accepts both a custom label (what the field is called) and a custom placeholder prompt (the hint text shown before you start typing) — handy for turning a generic "Notes" box into something like "Provenance & Condition History" with prompt text guiding what to record there.

When you add a new custom field, you'll choose from these types:

Managing Dropdown Option Lists in Bulk

Dropdown fields (Condition, Source, Status, and any custom Dropdown you create) each keep their own reusable list of options, editable from Settings → Dropdown Options. For quick one-off changes, add or remove a single value directly in the list. When you need to clean up a whole list at once — reordering it, fixing a batch of typos, or removing several stale values in one pass — click Bulk Edit to open a plain-text editor with one option per line: edit the text freely and save to replace the entire list in a single step.

Positioning & Ordering Fields

Field rows can be dragged up and down directly in the Layout Editor to reorder them, and assigned to one or more Sub-Groups — named sections (like "General Specifications" or "Vinyl") that structure the item entry modal into logical chunks instead of one long list. Sub-groups can even be made conditional: shown only when another field (a "Type" dropdown, say) is set to a particular value, so the form only ever shows fields that are actually relevant to the specific item being entered.

3. Cataloging Items & Rich Media

With a schema in place, adding an item is a straightforward form fill — accelerated wherever possible by scanning and autofill so you spend your time collecting, not typing.

Step-by-Step: Creating an Asset Record

1. Select the target Collection from the sidebar, then click Add New Item in the top toolbar.
2. The form opens as the New Item Entry Form (it reads Edit Item Entry Form when you reopen a saved item). Confirm the Collection Category at the top of the modal (it defaults to whichever Collection you had open).
3. Use Bar/QR Code Scan or Auto-Fill Specs if the item has a barcode or catalog number — see below — or fill in General Details manually.
4. Complete the Financial Portfolio section: Ownership Status, Acquisition Type, Purchase Date, and cost fields. These drive everything in Chapter 4.
5. Scroll to Description & Media to attach photos or documents (see the Media Pipeline below), then click Save.

Group Records: Tracking Quantities of Like Items

Not everything you own is best tracked as one standalone item. When you have several acquisitions of essentially the same thing — a case of the same wine across different vintages, or the same model of microphone bought in a few separate purchases — click New Group Record instead of Add New Item. A Group Record is a lightweight parent entry (it skips fields that don't apply at the group level, like Serial Number, Condition, or an individual Purchase Date) that exists purely to roll up the individual purchase records underneath it.

Each individual acquisition is still entered as its own full item — with its own quantity, purchase date, cost, and condition — and Vaultli automatically links it to the matching Group Record the moment its Brand and Model match, in either order: add the group first and items link to it as they're saved, or add items first and create the group afterward to sweep up any existing unlinked matches. The Group Record's own form then shows a live Grouped Items list plus aggregated Group Financials — total and average cost, and total and average current value — computed automatically across every linked item, so you always know your total count and blended cost basis for that wine or that microphone without adding up each purchase by hand.

Autofill Intelligence

Auto-Fill Specs looks up a UPC, barcode, or catalog number against external catalog sources (for example Discogs and MusicBrainz for music) and returns matched metadata — artist, title, year, genre, and similar — for you to review before it's applied to the form. For eligible items it also resolves cover art or product imagery automatically, downloading and re-compressing it to an efficient local copy rather than hot-linking to an external CDN that could go missing or rate-limit you later.

Movies in the Video Media collection are matched through The Movie Database (TMDB): title, year, director, studio, genre, and the top-billed cast (as “Actor as Character”). Nothing changes until you click Apply in the review window: fields that already match are collapsed into a single “fields already match” line, a filled field whose lookup value differs starts unchecked, and any brand-new dropdown value comes with an Also add to dropdown list checkbox. A quiet Data from… line at the bottom of the review window tells you which sources contributed.

The Data Sheet: Your Item on One Page

Open any saved item and click the teal Data Sheet button at the bottom of the form (next to Duplicate). Vaultli builds a clean, read-only, one-page view of the item: main photo and key facts at the top, then every field that has a value, grouped and ordered the way your category layout is, with the same colored section bands you see in the form. Empty fields are skipped, so you see only what you've recorded. Photos, attachments, attached items, and notes follow.

• Include financial section — a checkbox in the Data Sheet window. Leave it off to show or print the item without costs, values, or sale details (handy for sharing); turn it on for Acquisition, Valuation, Sale, Consignment, Insurance, Tax, and the net result, nested under a single Financial band.
• Print / Save as PDF — uses your browser's print dialog, with section colors preserved. Choose “Save as PDF” as the printer to keep a digital copy.
• Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals — shown in full under Financial (right after Acquisition) with costs, treatment, receipt links and the total cost line, even when the financial section is off, so the sheet works as a complete audit record of the item. The Value History chart appears under Valuation.

It works on phones too, so you can pull up a full item record at a glance without opening the editing form.

The Media Pipeline

Every item has a Photos & Documents gallery that treats images and PDFs as one unified list. You can click to browse, drag-and-drop files directly onto the gallery, or paste an image URL. The first photo in the list is automatically your item's Primary image — the "beauty shot" used everywhere the item appears in list and grid views — and you can reorder photos with the arrow controls to change which one holds that spot.

PDFs work exactly the same way as photos — drag in a scanned receipt, warranty card, or appraisal document and it joins the gallery as its own card, opening in a full in-app viewer on click.

4. Ownership States & The Financial Ledger

Every item carries an Ownership Status that drives how it's counted, valued, and displayed. Vaultli's status list is more granular than a simple owned/sold toggle, so your dashboard totals stay accurate through every stage an item actually passes through.

The Lifecycle Pipeline

Financial Tracking

An item's cost basis is built from Purchase Cost plus optional Taxes/Fees, Shipping and Accessories (less any discount), captured at acquisition, plus any Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals you choose to apply to it (below). Its current market valuation is a separate, editable field you update as prices move. The difference between the two is your gain or loss — unrealized while you still own the item, realized the moment its status changes to a disposed state like Sold or Donated. The Dashboard, item cards, group totals, charts, reports and the Data Sheet all use this same cost basis, so the numbers you see on an item always add up to the totals.

Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals

Every item (not Group Records) has a Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals section, between Financial Portfolio and Current Valuation. Use it to log the work and improvements an item has had over its life: a setup, a refret, new pickups, a re-cone, a professional cleaning. Collections that never need it (records, books, wine) can switch it off in their layout editor with Show Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals section.

• Add Entry opens a small editor: date, type (Maintenance, Upgrade or Renewal), cost treatment, cost, a short description, vendor, notes and a receipt (photo or PDF; you can also drag a file onto the section). Click Add Entry again (or press Enter) to stage it, then Save the item to keep it. Cancel discards your changes, just like every other field.
• Cost treatment decides whether the cost counts toward what the item cost you:
  • Apply Full Cost to Item (the default) adds it to the item's cost basis.
  • Do Not Apply Cost to Item keeps it for reference only (routine upkeep you don't want in your numbers).
  • Split Cost Ratably Across All Items appears for a record with a quantity of 2 or more (a pair of speakers, say); the cost is shared by quantity if you later sell part of the record.
• A totals line shows Total Purchase Cost + Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals = Total Cost incl. Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals, with reference-only costs listed separately.
• Receipts also appear in Photos & Documents with a teal Receipt badge. They belong to their entry: to replace or remove one, edit the entry. Receipts are never published to the Marketplace and are never used as the item's main photo.
• Selling part of a record: if you sell, gift, donate or dispose of some of the units, Vaultli asks where each entry's cost goes (stays with the remaining units, goes with the ones sold, or is split by quantity) before anything is saved.

Logging maintenance never changes an item's Current Value — revalue the item when an upgrade makes it worth more. An item with no Current Value set is treated as worth what it cost, including applied maintenance, so it doesn't show a loss just because you logged work.

Value History

Each time you save a new Current Est. Value or a new Last Valuation Date, Vaultli records a point in the item's Value History, shown as a small chart and table under Current Valuation (and on the Data Sheet). Re-confirming the same value on a new date counts as a point, so you can see how long a value has held. Use the × beside a point to remove a mistake, then Save. The newest point always mirrors the item's current value and date; to correct it, change those fields instead.

Subscriptions & Software

Two Collections cover software. Software (formerly Music Software) is for programs you bought: a plug-in, a DAW, a sample library. It behaves like any other item, with a purchase cost, a value, and a License Key / Serial field for the key. Condition, color and weight are hidden because they do not apply. Paid upgrades you buy later belong in Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals. Subscriptions is for services you rent by the week, month, quarter or year: streaming, cloud storage, memberships, software you pay for as you go. A subscription stops the moment you stop paying, so it is treated as a pure expense: it has no resale value, cannot be sold, donated or traded, and is never counted in your Portfolio Value or Net Investment. If you filed a rental under Software before, open it and change its Collection to Subscriptions; the form carries the amount over for you to confirm.

Which one? If you can own it, transfer it or sell it, keep it in Software as a normal asset. If it stops working when you stop paying and you can never own it, it is a pure expense: put it in Subscriptions. For a plug-in you bought that needs a yearly update plan, keep it in Software and log each yearly charge under Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals with the entry Type set to Renewal; a Renewal starts as Do Not Apply Cost to Item, so they stay an ongoing expense and do not raise the item's cost basis.

A subscription's form asks for the type, status (Active, Paused or Cancelled), the amount per billing cycle, the billing cycle, a start date, an optional next renewal date, an optional end date, auto-renew, and an account hint. Billing & Renewals then shows two things worked out for you: the next renewal (it rolls forward on its own, so you never have to update the date after each charge; a paused, cancelled or ended subscription shows none) and paid to date, the total actually billed since the start date.

Subscription tiles show what each one costs per year, what you have paid to date and when it renews next; the Subscriptions list has matching sortable columns instead of the purchase and valuation columns.

A subscription's Data Sheet includes a Billing & Renewals section: how long it has been in effect, how many charges so far, how many price changes, and (with the financial section on) total paid to date. A Price history list beneath it shows each price and the date it started, much like Maintenance, Upgrades & Renewals does for other items.

Prices change. Click Price history… to see the price periods behind those numbers. Vaultli adds the first one when you save, and adds a new one dated today whenever you change the Amount or Billing Cycle, so the old price is still used for the old months. You can add, edit or remove lines yourself, for example a $0 line for a free trial or a paused stretch. When a renewal is within 14 days, the item shows a bell badge and the Subscription Cost tile lists what is renewing soon. These reminders appear in the app only; Vaultli does not send emails or notifications.

The Valuation Dashboard

The Dashboard's top-row tiles roll every item in every Collection into five portfolio-wide numbers:

Below the tiles, the Category Value Allocation donut chart breaks total value down by Collection, so you can see at a glance where your capital is actually concentrated.

Estate Planning: The Bequeath Field

Every item's Financial Portfolio section includes a Bequeathed To field — a simple place to record who a specific item should go to, as part of an estate plan or a will. It's entirely optional and has no effect on day-to-day ownership status or valuation; it's there to be captured once, per item, so the information is sitting alongside the item itself rather than a separate spreadsheet you have to keep in sync. It's also included automatically in CSV exports, so an executor or estate planner can get a full item-by-item distribution list without you having to compile one manually. See the Report Generator in Chapter 6 for a dedicated report built specifically around this field.

5. Browsing, Searching & View States

The right view depends on the task: skimming cover art, scanning a compact list, or comparing numbers side by side. Vaultli gives you all three, one click apart, in the view-switcher at the top right of any Collection.

Three View Layouts

Vaultli opens in Tile view unless a Collection has its own Default View (set in its layout editor). The highlighted button always shows the view you are looking at.

Multi-Parameter Filtering

Every Collection view opens with an All Items filter dropdown for narrowing by Ownership Status, plus a Show Hidden toggle for items you've deliberately tucked out of daily view. The filter icon beside the search bar opens the advanced panel for stacking additional conditions — category-specific dropdown values, valuation ranges, and custom field tags — so a large Collection stays navigable no matter how it's grown.

Global Instant Search

The search bar at the top of every Collection queries as you type, matching across both system fields (Brand, Model, Year…) and every custom field you've defined for that Collection — so a search for a pressing plant, a serial number fragment, or a custom tag surfaces results just as reliably as a search by artist or brand.

Mass Update: Bulk-Editing Many Items at Once

Click Mass Update in the top toolbar to open a dedicated selection screen for editing many items in one pass. Filter by category, search by keyword, or stack an advanced condition (a specific field compared against a value), then check the items you want to change — your selections are preserved as you keep searching, so you can check a few items, clear the search, search for something else entirely, and check more without losing what you already picked.

With items selected, choose a field — Category, Condition, Status, and most other schema fields are available — and a single new value to apply. Confirming updates every selected item and syncs the change to the cloud immediately, which makes reclassifying a whole batch after a schema change, or updating Condition across an entire shelf you just re-inspected, a matter of seconds rather than opening each item individually.

Reading the Badges & Icons

Every card, dense tile, and table row carries a color-coded status badge, matching the lifecycle groups from Chapter 4:

A handful of smaller icon badges layer on top:

6. Privacy, Data Portability & The Marketplace

Vaultli is a private inventory system first — nothing leaves your account unless you explicitly say so. The Global Discover Marketplace is the one feature where sharing is possible, and it's built around sender-controlled visibility at every layer: the listing itself, its photos, and its fields.

The Global Discover Marketplace

Any item can be listed from its own edit modal under Marketplace & Sharing, with a Listing Status of Public Showcase (display only), Public Trade, or Public Sale, plus a Marketplace Category so buyers can browse by type. Once listed, other users can message you directly about the item — nothing about your account beyond what you choose to publish is ever exposed.

Privacy Controls

Three safeguards apply specifically to what a public listing actually shows:

• Selective "Public" photo checkboxes — every photo in an item's gallery has its own toggle for inclusion in a public listing. Only your current Primary photo is public by default; everything else stays private until you check it in.
• Automatic PDF/receipt exclusion — documents attached to an item (receipts, appraisals, warranty cards) are never eligible for publication, full stop. There's no checkbox that can expose them, by design.
• Private-by-default Notes — the Notes field is excluded from public listings unless a category's schema is explicitly reconfigured to publish it, keeping free-text fields — the ones most likely to contain something you didn't mean to share — off the Marketplace by default.

Field-level visibility for everything else is controlled the same way described in Chapter 2: a field only appears on a public listing if its Marketplace visibility is switched on in that Collection's Layout Editor.

The Report Generator

Click Reports in the top header to open the Report Generator — a dedicated tool for turning your inventory into a formatted document for someone outside the app, separate from the raw CSV/JSON export described below. Pick a report type first, since it changes both the header fields you fill in and the report's framing:

• Personal / Collection Report — a general-purpose valuation report under your own name, suited to a simple portfolio summary for your own records.
• Insurance Report — asks for the insured owner's name, insurance carrier, and policy or reference number, and produces a Gear Valuation & Insurance Report formatted for a claims adjuster or to satisfy a policy's scheduled-items documentation requirement. The carrier and policy number fill in from your current policy, which you can keep (with its declarations page PDF and any riders) under Settings → Profile & Insurance → Insurance Policies. This is the report worth using before you ever need to file a claim, not after.
• Estate & Testamentary Distribution Statement — asks for the testator's name, the estate executor or trustee, and a will/trust reference, and lays out each item's current value alongside its Bequeathed To field from Chapter 4, giving an executor a ready-made distribution statement.

Whichever type you choose, apply filters — category, ownership status, brand, model, or acquisition source — to scope the report to exactly the items it should cover, and choose whether to include photos and specifications. From there, download a structured CSV for further analysis, or generate a formatted, print-ready PDF for handing to a carrier, adjuster, or executor.

Data Portability

Your data is never locked in. Settings → Import / Export lets you download your complete portfolio as a portable JSON file (a full-fidelity backup, restorable back into Vaultli) or a CSV file (a flat spreadsheet suited to sharing with an insurance agent, an estate planner, or anyone who just wants the numbers). The same screen accepts a JSON or CSV file back in for import, and offers a curated sample collection if you'd like to explore the app with realistic data before committing your own.

Storage, Safety Nets & Data Sources

Your items are now kept in your browser's IndexedDB database on each device (with the cloud as the master copy), so collection size is no longer limited by the small browser quota that earlier versions used. The Import / Export screen still shows a browser-storage meter (percent used); if Vaultli ever warns that local storage is full, your changes remain safe in the cloud, and a fresh Export JSON backup is a good habit.

• Safer syncing — Vaultli will not upload while a load is still in progress, never deletes cloud items just because the local list is empty, halts and asks if a sync would remove a large share of your items, and warns before you close the tab with changes that haven't synced yet.
• Deleted offline stays deleted — an item you delete while offline is remembered and removed from the cloud once you reconnect.
• Erase All Data is protected — it requires typing a confirmation phrase, downloads a full JSON backup first, shows how many items exist in the cloud, and only affects your own records.
• Emptying a collection safely — Import / Export → Delete a Collection's Items saves a backup, asks for a typed confirmation, removes the items in seconds, and keeps a 30-day window in which importing the backup restores everything. After day 30 the items' stored photos and documents are erased automatically; that timer runs only on the device where you pressed Delete. The User Guide (Chapter 8) has the details.
• About & Data Sources — the link at the bottom of the left sidebar (also reachable from the Help dialog) lists where Autofill information comes from and the required credits for each provider.