Assets, kits & labels

This page covers the things you track in Shelf — assets, kits, locations and quantities — and the label-and-scan story that connects a physical case to its Shelf record: the six-character Shelf code, what's printed on a 12mm label, and what happens when someone scans it.

Assets, kits and locations

An asset is one thing you track — a camera body, a flight case, a specific cable. Every asset has a category, an optional location, and whatever custom fields your workspace has set up.

Assets come in two types:

• Individual assets are tracked one at a time — this specific camera, not "a camera". Each one gets its own QR code and can only be in one place (or on one booking) at once.
• Quantity-tracked assets are a stock pool with a count — a box of 250 cable ties, 40 two-way radios. You book and check out a quantity, not a specific unit, and Shelf tracks how many are on the shelf, in custody, in kits, and reserved on upcoming bookings so you always know what's actually free to book.

A kit groups assets that travel together — a full audio rig, a lighting package — so you can add, book, and check them in or out as one unit instead of hunting down every individual piece each time. A kit has its own location, which its member assets follow automatically when the kit moves. See Kits & custody for what else a kit does for you.

Opening one asset shows its overview — title, photo, category, location and custom fields — with tabs for its booking history, custody, and notes.

Locations are where things live when they're not out on a job — your store, a prep bay, a satellite office, or wherever the wizard seeded for you based on your setup answers. Assets and kits each have one location at a time, so "what's actually on the shelf" is always answerable without a physical stocktake — until it drifts, which is what audits are for.

The Shelf code

Every QR code Shelf creates — on an asset, a kit, or a bare printed label waiting to be linked — has a short, human-readable alias alongside it: the Shelf code. It looks like ARTGRP-123ABC on screen, and as four stacked lines (ART / GRP / 123 / ABC) on a label.

A few things worth knowing about it:

• It's six characters from a deliberately confusable-free alphabet (no 0, O, 1, I, or L), so reading a code off a scuffed label over the phone to a colleague doesn't turn into a guessing game.
• It's random, not sequential — you can't guess one code from another, which matters because a code is also a public lookup key on the lost & found portal.
• It resolves exactly the same way a full QR scan does: type ARTGRP-123ABC or scan its QR, and you land on the same asset or kit either way.

You can switch your workspace's display preference to show Shelf codes instead of raw QR ids wherever a code chip appears, from Settings → General. Gear that already carries a manufacturer's barcode can use that instead — Barcodes & codes covers all of it.

What's on a label

Labels are generated from a fixed set of presets — a preset is a brand × layout × tape-size combination — rather than a freeform designer, which keeps every printed label predictable and scannable. Your workspace has a default preset; a category can pin a specific one if it needs to.

The label most relevant to the Shelf code system is the 12mm stacked label (12mm tape, about 69mm long), which carries, top to bottom:

1. A QR code encoding the short lookup URL for this asset or kit.
2. The Shelf code, stacked as ART / GRP / 123 / ABC.
3. A rotated Code 128 barcode of the bare code, for warehouse scanners that read barcodes rather than QR.
4. A found-host strip — the lost & found address (found.artgrp.au or your brand's equivalent) printed along the label so a finder without a QR scanner handy still has an address to go to.

Other tape sizes (25mm, 50mm) carry more information where there's room — phone number, email, address, your logo — and less where there isn't; the smallest layouts (12mm square, 25mm square) are QR-only or QR-plus-barcode, because there's genuinely no room for more text without shrinking it below a readable size. Printing labels has the size-by-size breakdown.

Printing and scanning

Once a printer is connected (see Getting started), printing a label takes one click from an asset or kit's detail page, or from the "Get a label" button on the assets index and the scanner — which is the fast path for adding gear: print a blank label, scan it, then fill in the title and a photo, rather than typing everything by hand before you have anything to print.

Scanning is just your phone's camera — open QR Scanner from the sidebar, or use your phone's own camera app, and point it at any label.

What happens on scan

What actually happens depends on who's scanning and what the code is linked to:

• You, signed into the code's own workspace, code already linked — you land straight on the asset or kit's overview page.
• You, signed in, code not yet linked to anything — you land on the "Quick add" panel and give it a title, the only required field, which creates the asset in one step. There's a photo picker on the same panel, but it doesn't currently attach the photo to the asset — add a photo afterward from the asset's edit page. See Troubleshooting.
• Anyone not signed into that workspace — including a member of the public, or someone signed into a different Shelf workspace — lands on the lost & found portal instead. The never-leak rule there is strict: a public scan only ever shows the item's title, category and your workspace's public contact details — never valuation, custody, location, or notes.

Related

• Barcodes & codes — the full identifier story
• Printing labels — printers, tape sizes and calibration
• Organising your gear — categories, tags, custom fields and asset models
• Kits & custody — kits in depth, and who's holding what
• Bookings & the calendar — adding gear and kits to a booking
• Reminders — a scheduled nudge against a single asset
• Audits — checking the shelf against the records
• Lost & found — the full found-portal story
• Troubleshooting — labels that won't scan, and QR codes that don't go anywhere
• Importing from a spreadsheet — bringing in assets and kits you already track