Kits & custody

Two ideas that get confused with each other, and with bookings, more than anything else in Shelf. A kit is gear that travels together. Custody is who's physically holding something right now. A booking is a reservation for a date range. They're three different questions and they can all be true at once.

Kits: things that travel together

A kit is a named group of assets that get pulled, packed, booked and returned as one thing — the small audio rig, the comms package, the presenter's flight case. It exists so nobody has to remember the contents.

What a kit gives you:

• One thing to add. Put a kit on a booking and every member asset goes on with it, grouped on the booking rather than spread through the list as loose rows.
• One thing to move. A kit has its own location, and changing it moves every asset inside it. That's the point — if the rig is in prep bay 2, so is everything in it, and you shouldn't have to say that forty times.
• One thing to check in and out. Check-out and check-in work on the kit as a unit.
• One thing to hand over. Assign custody of a kit and every asset in it goes into that person's custody too (more on that below).
• Its own QR code and label. A kit can be labelled like an asset, which is what you want on the outside of the case.

A kit can hold quantity-tracked assets as well as individual ones — the kit takes a slice of the pool ("this rig includes 6 of the 40 radios"), and the remaining 34 stay free for everything else.

Kits have their own status, mirroring assets: Available, In custody, Checked out.

Custody: who's holding what

Custody answers "if I need this right now, who do I ring?"

You assign it from an asset or a kit — Assign custody, pick a team member, done. Releasing it is the same journey in reverse. Both write a line into the item's activity, so there's always a record of who had it and when it came back.

Three things make custody more useful than it first looks:

• The custodian doesn't need a login. A non-registered member — a freelancer, a casual, a driver — can hold custody without an account. That's the whole reason custody exists separately from bookings: real crew are often not Shelf users. See Signing in.
• Kit custody cascades, and un-cascades cleanly. Give someone a kit and its assets follow into their custody. Release the kit and those inherited custodies go with it — but any custody you assigned to an asset directly is left alone, because you meant that one and Shelf shouldn't undo it on your behalf.
• Quantity-tracked assets can be partly in custody. Six radios with the stage manager, thirty-four on the shelf, and the availability maths knows the difference.

Who can assign it

• Owners and Admins can assign custody of anything to anyone.
• Self-service users can take custody — but only for themselves. They can't hand your gear to someone else.
• Base users can't assign custody at all.

Custody is not a booking

This is the distinction worth getting right, because using the wrong one is how gear goes missing on paper.

	Custody	Booking
Answers	Who is holding this now	Who has this reserved, for which dates
Has dates	No — it's true until released	Yes — a from and a to
Affects availability	No. Custody doesn't reserve anything or stop a future booking being made.	Yes. A reserved booking holds the gear for its window and conflicts with anything overlapping.
Needs a login	No	The custodian doesn't; whoever builds it does
Ends when	Someone releases it	Everything is checked back in

The rough rule: if it has dates, it's a booking. If it's just "Sam's got it", it's custody.

They interact in exactly one place you need to know about. An asset in someone's custody can't be checked out on a booking. If you assign custody to something that's already reserved on an upcoming job, Shelf warns you at the time and links to the booking — but it doesn't stop you, because sometimes that's genuinely what you meant. What it does mean is that check-out will fail on the day unless the custody is released first. Read the warning; it's the one that costs you a morning.

Finding out who's got what

Three ways, for three different questions:

• Right now, across the workspace — the Custody Snapshot report (Owners and Admins). Who's holding what, how much it's worth, and how long they've had it. See Reports.
• This one item's history — the asset or kit's own activity tab.
• Is it actually where they say it is? — start an audit from a team member's page. That builds a stocktake from everything in their custody, which is exactly what you want when a freelancer finishes up: scan back what they hand over, and whatever's left unscanned is the conversation.

A custody that's been open for six months is usually not gear that's still out. It's a release nobody did. Worth a sweep every so often.

Related

• Assets, kits & labels — assets, kits, locations and quantities
• Bookings & the calendar — the dated side of the same gear
• Audits — checking custody against reality
• Reports — Custody Snapshot and the rest
• Signing in — roles, and crew who never log in
• Glossary — kit vs custody vs booking, defined side by side
• Troubleshooting — when custody blocks a check-out on the day