A home inventory that actually helps when you need it.

You can, and the floor you should hit (photo, one-line description, room) works in any tool. The reason a dedicated app helps is the tiering: an insurance inventory has three layers of detail (everything gets the floor, valuables get brand/model/serial/price, high-value items get replacement cost and appraisal), and a spreadsheet doesn't enforce any of that. ClearBench's Home Inventory starter lays the three layers out as tabs so the next item you add prompts you for the right things, not all of them, every time.

Nothing. Your data is on your computer in a local database, and full-catalogue backups are plain .clearbench JSON files you can keep forever. We also export to CSV, Excel, and plain text from any collection at any time. If you stop using ClearBench, your inventory doesn't vanish into a discontinued cloud service. It's already on your hard drive in formats other software can read.

The Home Inventory starter has a Deceased Estate mode you can toggle on for a collection. With it on, every item shows an extra Probate tab with the columns estate work needs: disposition (undecided / keep / sell / donate / distributed), beneficiary, distribution date, date-of-death fair market value, the appraiser's name and licence, the relevant tax schedule, a sentimental flag, and a place for comparable sales links. The estate metadata (decedent's name, date of death, executor, case number) lives on the collection itself and shows as a banner at the top of every item, so whoever is doing the work always knows whose estate they're in.

Photos can be added on desktop today. Mobile companion capture (snap a photo on your phone, push it to the matching item on your desktop, originals stay on both devices) is on the near-term roadmap; until then the workflow is to import photos from your existing camera roll using the desktop file picker, which is one extra step but doesn't change anything about where the photos live: the originals stay in your camera roll, the inventory copies stay on your computer, no cloud round-trip in either direction.

You leave the serial blank and revisit later when you do unmount or service the appliance. The starter doesn't require a serial; it's a useful field for valuables but not a gate on saving the item. The same logic applies to receipts you don't have: estimate the purchase price from memory, mark the source as 'estimate', and update later if you find the receipt. A partial item record is vastly more useful than a missing one.

For most claims: itemised list with descriptions, photographs, purchase dates and prices, brand and model and serial for anything mechanical, replacement cost for anything scheduled (jewellery, art, instruments). ClearBench's collection report PDF generates a printable document with all of this for every item in a collection, plus a label preview for each, which is the standard format insurers ask for. You generate the report on your computer; the report PDF is the only artefact that ever leaves your machine, and only if you choose to send it.

Yes. Create one collection per property (main house, rental, holiday home) and they live alongside each other. You can also use a dedicated estate-mode collection for someone else's estate while keeping your household one separate. Each collection has its own metadata, items, and labels, and shows up as a separate tab in the app.