Glossary

This is for the ten minutes where the words are the problem, not the gear. Shelf reuses ordinary words — asset, kit, booking, custody, location — for specific things, and a few of them sound interchangeable until you've been caught out once. This page exists so you get caught out zero times.

Each entry says what the word means in Shelf, and — where it matters — what it's easily confused with.

Asset

One thing you track. A camera body, a flight case, a specific length of cable. Every asset is either individual (this exact item, tracked one at a time) or quantity-tracked (a stock pool with a count, like 40 radios). See Assets, kits & labels.

Not the same as a kit. An asset is one thing. A kit is a group of things.

Kit

A named group of assets that always travel, book, and get checked in and out together — a lighting rig, a comms package. A kit has its own location and its own QR code, and moving or booking the kit moves or books everything inside it. See Kits & custody.

Not the same as a booking. A kit is a permanent grouping of gear. A booking is a temporary reservation that might include a kit, several loose assets, or both.

Location

Where something lives when it's not out on a job — your store, a prep bay, a satellite office. Every asset and kit has one location at a time. A location is a record, not a fact checked in real time — what an audit exists to verify.

Booking

A reservation of gear for a date range: from DRAFT (being put together) to RESERVED (confirmed, holding availability) to ONGOING (checked out) to COMPLETE (everything back). See Bookings & the calendar.

Not the same as custody. A booking has dates and affects availability. It answers "who has this reserved, and when." Custody has no dates and doesn't touch availability — it answers "who's physically holding this right now." The two interact in exactly one place: an asset in someone's custody can't be checked out on a booking until that custody is released. See Kits & custody for the full comparison table.

Custody

Who is personally holding an asset or kit at this moment, independent of any booking. The custodian doesn't need a Shelf login — see non-registered member — which is what makes custody usable for freelancers who never sign in. See Kits & custody.

Audit (stocktake)

A real, walk-the-shelves count. You pick a set of assets that should be somewhere, scan what's actually there, and Shelf tells you the drift: found, missing, unexpected. "Stocktake" and "audit" mean the same thing here — Shelf's UI and this guide both say "audit." See Audits.

Not the same as a report. A report is a standing, read-only number generated from the records Shelf already believes — "what's overdue right now," "who's holding what." An audit is the only place those records get checked against the physical shelf. If the question is "is what's on the shelf what the system says," that's an audit. If it's "what does the system say," that's a report.

QR code

The square on the label. Every asset and kit gets one when it's created; so does every blank label printed from the pool. Scanning it (signed in, your org) opens the asset or kit directly. See Barcodes & codes.

Shelf code

The six-character alias printed alongside the QR — ARTGRP-123ABC on screen, stacked as ART / GRP / 123 / ABC on a 12mm label. It's a second way to say the same identifier the QR encodes: read it aloud over the phone, type it into search or the found portal, and you land on the same asset a scan would have given you. It is not a separate code from the QR — they're two views of the same underlying record. See Barcodes & codes.

Alternative barcode (manufacturer barcode)

A barcode the gear already carries — a manufacturer's Code 128 tag, a retail EAN-13, a DataMatrix on a piece of electronics. You record it against an asset instead of covering it with a Shelf label. Not minted by Shelf — unlike the QR and Shelf code, which Shelf creates itself, an alternative barcode is something you tell Shelf about because it already exists on the item. See Barcodes & codes.

SAM ID

SAM-0001, SAM-0002 — a plain sequential number assigned in creation order. Not printed on labels, not encoded in a QR; just a display option for teams who already think in "asset 47" terms. See Barcodes & codes.

Category

The primary grouping for what kind of thing an asset is — "Cameras", "Lighting", "Cabling." Every asset has exactly one. Categories can carry their own colour, their own default label preset, and their own custom fields.

Tag

A label you can put on more than one thing at once, across categories — "Needs service", "Client-owned", "Fragile." Unlike a category, an asset can carry several tags or none.

Custom field

A field your workspace adds to the asset form beyond Shelf's built-in ones — a test-and-tag date, a serial number, an insured value. Seven types are available (text, multi-line text, number, amount, date, yes/no, and a picklist). A custom field can be scoped to only the categories that need it.

Asset model

A reusable template — name, category, valuation, a cover photo — for a kind of gear rather than one physical item. Its main job is bulk creation: pick a model and Shelf can create several individual assets from it in one go, each sharing the model's defaults. Asset models are an individual-asset concept; quantity-tracked assets don't use them.

Reminder

A one-off, scheduled note against a single asset — "Service this camera by June," "Insurance renewal due" — that emails the team members you assign at the date and time you set. Reminders don't repeat; set a new one each time. See Reminders.

Non-registered member (NRM)

A team-member record with no login at all — no invite email, no password, nothing to administer. They can hold custody and be named a booking's custodian, which covers most of what a casual or freelance crew member needs without you managing a seat for them. See Signing in.

Role

What a signed-in person can see and do: Owner (one per workspace, full control), Administrator (everything except taking over ownership), Base (the gear and the work, not the workspace's plumbing), Self service (their own bookings end to end, plus taking custody for themselves). See Signing in.

Workspace

Your company's whole Shelf account — every asset, kit, booking and person in it. The first person from a company to sign in creates it; everyone after that joins it.

Print relay

The small always-on program that turns a cloud print job into ink on tape. It runs on a machine on the same network as your printer and polls Shelf for work — Shelf never talks to the printer directly. See Printing labels.

Found portal

The no-login page a stranger lands on when they scan a lost item's label — found.artgrp.au or your brand's equivalent. Shows the item's title and category only, never valuation, custody or notes. See Lost & found.

Related

• How Shelf works — how these pieces fit together
• Your first week with Shelf — what to actually do with them
• Troubleshooting — when one of these behaves unexpectedly