What's in Shelf today

A plain-language inventory of what Shelf actually does right now, for someone evaluating it or onboarding a team — not a developer. Everything below was checked against the running code on 2026-09-04, not assumed from a feature list or an old plan. Where something below was removed, it's called out explicitly rather than left for you to discover the hard way.

If you want the day-to-day walkthrough instead of an inventory, see the user guide. For the history of how Shelf got here, see What's new.

Signing in

Three ways in, all live today:

• Google Workspace SSO — for staff on a company Google Workspace domain.
• Email and password, with a self-service password reset.
• SMS one-time code — for people you invite who don't get a company login: guests, clients, crew.

Which options a person sees depends on how they were invited. There's no public sign-up — every account is provisioned by an admin first.

Tracking gear

• Assets — the individual things you own: a camera, a case, a light. Each one has a category, a location, custom fields you define, and its own activity history.
• Kits — a group of assets that move together (a camera kit, a lighting kit). Book, check out and check in the kit as one unit instead of hunting down its pieces individually.
• Bookings — reserve assets and kits for a date range, with calendar views and conflict detection so the same item can't be double-booked.
• Custody — who currently has an asset in their hands, separate from where it's booked. Assign and release custody, and see the history of who has held something.
• Locations — where things live when they're not out. Assets and kits can be filtered and browsed by location.

Knowing what you actually have

• Audits (stocktakes) — scan through a location or a list and reconcile what's physically there against what Shelf thinks is there. Tracks what was found, missing, or in the wrong place.
• Reports — inventory value, asset utilisation, overdue items, custody snapshots, booking compliance and activity, generated from real booking and audit data rather than typed up by hand.
• CSV import — bring in an existing spreadsheet of assets in bulk instead of adding them one at a time, with an update path for correcting an import afterwards.

Codes, scanning and labels

• QR codes — every asset and kit gets one, mintable in bulk ahead of time and linked to a real item later (useful when you're printing labels before you've catalogued everything).
• Six-character Shelf codes — a short alias for a QR code (for example ARTGRP-123ABC), designed to be read off a label over the phone or typed in without a scanner. Works everywhere a QR code does: the web app, the qr.artgrp.au shortener, the Lost & Found portal, and the mobile app.
• Barcodes — Code128 and DataMatrix are supported alongside QR codes, available to every workspace.
• Label printing — print asset and kit labels directly to a Brother VC-500W (colour tape) or a Zebra ZD411D (direct thermal), including a 12mm continuous-tape layout carrying the QR code, the Shelf code, a barcode and a Lost & Found strip on one label. Printing goes through a small relay program that runs on a computer near the printer, so a phone anywhere on the network can queue a label without talking to the printer directly.

When gear goes missing

Lost & Found — a public portal (no login required) that anyone can reach by scanning a lost item's code or its label's printed instructions. They can look up the code's status and send a report, which lands back in Shelf against the real asset. Built for the moment someone outside your team finds something of yours.

Getting a team set up

• First-run onboarding wizard — a short, skippable set of questions asked when a new workspace is created (how much gear you're tracking, how staff will look items up, what you need to prove for insurance or compliance), used to tailor the workspace instead of leaving everyone on generic defaults.
• Guided empty states — assets, kits, locations, bookings, categories, tags and audits all show helpful next steps instead of a blank screen before you've added anything.

Mobile

A companion app (iOS and Android) covers QR and barcode scanning, asset lookup, audits and bookings from a phone, talking to the same Shelf backend as the web app.

What used to be here and isn't anymore

Shelf briefly grew a set of production-agency features — rate cards and quotes, purchase orders and vendors, vehicles and transport, clients, call sheets and crew, and a client-facing request portal — under an internal codename ("Aura"). On 3 September 2026 these were removed and Shelf returned to its core, group-branded feature set described above. If you see these mentioned in older material, they are not in the product today. See What's new for the full history of that change.