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Organising your gear ​

Four tools decide how your gear is structured and searchable: categories, tags, custom fields, and asset models. This page is for whoever's setting those up — usually an Owner or Admin — and covers what each one is for, so you reach for the right one instead of stretching one to do a job it wasn't built for.

The short version: category is the one answer, tag is any number of answers, custom field is a question your workspace specifically needs answered, and asset model is a template for creating a lot of the same thing at once.

Only the asset model sits before an asset exists — it's a template that feeds defaults into creation. The other three are properties an asset carries for as long as it exists.

Categories: what kind of thing is this ​

Every asset has exactly one category — "Cameras," "Lighting," "Cabling." It's the primary axis everything else hangs off:

  • Filters and the assets index group by it.
  • A category can pin its own default label preset, so lenses print differently from flight cases without anyone having to remember to choose.
  • A custom field can be scoped to only the categories that actually need it.

Categories get a name, an optional description, and a colour, which is what you're seeing as the coloured dot next to a category name throughout the app. The setup wizard seeds a starting set based on the kind of work you told it you do; rename or delete what doesn't fit rather than working around a category that's obviously wrong for your gear.

One category per asset, always. If something genuinely straddles two categories — a hybrid stills/video camera, say — pick the one you'd search for it under first, and use a tag for the rest.

Tags: any number of true things ​

A tag is a label an asset can carry alongside its category — as many as apply, or none. Where a category answers "what kind of thing is this," a tag answers "what's also true about it right now": Needs service, Client-owned, Fragile, Loaner.

Tags have a name, an optional description, and a colour, same as categories, but the relationship is different: a tag cuts across categories. Needs service might apply to a camera, a light and a case of cables at once, and none of them stop belonging to their own category to carry it.

Booking settings can require at least one tag on every booking — see Workspace settings — which is worth turning on if your team wants an easy way to filter "what went out for the Riverside job" later without hunting through booking names.

Custom fields: the questions your workspace needs answered ​

Shelf's built-in asset fields (title, category, location, valuation) cover most workspaces. A custom field is what you add when your workspace specifically needs to record something Shelf doesn't ask about out of the box — a test-and-tag date, a serial number your insurer wants, a "current firmware version" note.

Each custom field has:

  • A name and an optional help text shown while filling it in.
  • A type — plain text, multi-line text, a number, a monetary amount, a date, a yes/no toggle, or a fixed picklist of options. Pick the type that matches how you'd actually query it later: a date field sorts and filters properly, free text in a text field doesn't.
  • Required or optional. A required custom field has to be filled in before an asset in its scope can be saved.
  • Active or inactive. Deactivating a field hides it from the asset form and page without deleting anything already recorded in it — the right move for a field you no longer collect but don't want to lose history for.
  • Scoped to categories, or not. By default a custom field applies to every asset. Turn on "Use for select categories" to limit it to just the categories that need it, so your lighting gear doesn't carry an empty "Lens mount" field.

Add custom fields from Settings → Custom fields. Worth restating the advice from your first week: add one when you actually need to answer the question it asks, not speculatively — every field on the form is something everyone has to look at or skip past when adding gear.

Asset models: templates for a kind of gear ​

An asset model is a reusable template — name, category, a default valuation, a cover photo — for a kind of item rather than one physical piece of gear. Its main job is bulk creation.

If you've just bought a dozen identical wireless mic receivers, creating an asset model for "Sennheiser EW-DX" once and then bulk-creating from it beats typing the same category and valuation into the New Asset form twelve times:

  1. Settings → Asset models → New — give it a name, category, default valuation and (optionally) a cover photo used on every asset created from it that doesn't have its own.
  2. From New asset → Bulk create from model, pick that model, a name template (use {i} where you want the item number substituted — EW-DX receiver {i} becomes EW-DX receiver 1, EW-DX receiver 2, and so on), and a count (2 to 100 at once).
  3. Shelf creates that many individual assets in one action, each carrying the model's category and valuation, each with its own QR code.

A few things worth knowing:

  • Asset models are an individual-asset concept. Quantity-tracked assets (a pool of 40 radios you draw down as a count) don't use models — there's only one record to begin with.
  • The model is a starting point, not a lock. Nothing stops you editing one of the created assets afterward — a different valuation, a different photo — the model just sets the defaults at creation time.
  • Existing assets can also be assigned to a model after the fact from a bulk-select action on the assets index, which is the tidy-up move if you added a batch of identical gear individually before setting up the model.

Everything on this site is written by Artefact Group for our own installation. Shelf is a fork of the AGPL-3.0 licensed Shelf.nu project — for upstream’s own documentation, see docs.shelf.nu.

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