How to keep everything on the record.

Press Add. Choose parent item. Name the thing. Lode gives it a code and it's on the record.

That's the whole process. You don't need to catalogue everything you own today — most people file a handful of items, live with the app for a week, and build out from there. The archive works at any size.

The rest of this page explains the few ideas worth knowing: what parents and children are, what the codes mean, how quantities work, and what dynamic inventory does.

Lode has exactly two kinds of item, and once they click, everything else follows.

A parent item is the general thing — 'iPhone 7,' 'Woodscrews,' 'Vinyl records.' It can be a thing you own, or simply a folder you're organising under. A child item is one specific unit that lives beneath a parent: this iPhone, the one with the cracked corner. The main inventory page shows parents only; open a parent and its children are the page.

Every item carries a permanent code. The parent takes ip7-0000; its children count upward — ip7-0001, ip7-0002 — in the order they arrived. Two rules give the codes their meaning:

• The prefix locks once a parent has its first child. Rename the parent freely; the code stays, because the code is identity, not description.

• Codes are never reused. Delete ip7-0001 or move it elsewhere and that number is retired forever. The gaps in your sequence aren't untidiness — they're history. If an old note, photo, or export mentions ip7-0001, it will only ever mean one object, for the life of your archive. That's the difference between a ledger and a list.

• The householder — File the things that matter and the places they hide. A parent called 'Camera gear,' children for each body and lens. A parent called 'Loft boxes' as pure folder — children for what's actually in them. When the insurance form asks what you own, your archive answers.

• The maker & seller — Stock is money that hasn't moved yet. A parent per product line; children for variants that matter; quantities (Section IV) for the interchangeable stuff. When something sells, tap minus. When the restock arrives, tap plus. The record stays true between your shelf and your listings.

• The kit-builder — Some things you own are really assemblies of other things — the market-stall setup, the away-game bag, the picnic hamper. Dynamic inventory (Section V) makes the kit's availability follow its parts automatically, so the archive tells you the one thing counting can't: whether the whole is actually ready.

One box of a hundred identical woodscrews is not a hundred items. It's one item that happens to exist a hundred times.

That's what the quantity field is for. On any item — parent or child — the number with + and − beside it says how many of that exact thing exist. Take three screws for a shelf: tap minus three times, or type the new total. The item never multiplies; only its count moves.

The rule of thumb: if you'd tell the units apart, make them children. If you wouldn't, make them a quantity. Your two guitars are children (different instruments, different stories, different codes). Your guitar picks are one item, quantity twelve.

Here is a truth known to anyone who has ever left the corkscrew at home: a picnic without a corkscrew is not a picnic. It's a field with sandwiches.

Dynamic inventory exists for exactly this. Make a parent called 'Picnic hamper,' switch on Dynamic inventory, and write its recipe — what one complete hamper requires:

From then on the hamper's quantity is calculated, not counted. Own 2 blankets, 9 plates, 2 flasks, and 1 corkscrew? Lode says: 1 hamper available — limited by corkscrew. Buy a second corkscrew and it becomes 2, all by itself. Lend out the flasks and it drops to zero, and tells you why.

Three things worth knowing:

• Recipes can reach anywhere. Components don't have to be the hamper's own children — point at any item in your archive. Your one box of napkins can serve the hamper recipe and the guest-room recipe, each needing a different amount, both computed from the same stock.

• Dynamic parents don't get a stepper. Their number is derived, so there's nothing to tap — change the components and the kit follows. (That's the point.)

• You can switch it off. Toggle dynamic off and the recipe waits, inert, while the item goes back to plain counting. Toggle it on and the recipe resumes.

Archives are alive. Things get reorganised. Lode allows all of it, with one honest consequence: when an item moves, it gets a new code, and the old one retires.

Move a child to a different parent and it takes the next number under its new family — the confirmation shows you old and new before anything happens. Promote a child into a parent of its own and it gets a fresh prefix and its own -0000. Demote a parent under another and it, and all its children, are re-coded under the destination in one move — and its old prefix is retired with it, permanently.

Why so strict? Because a code that could mean two different objects at two different times is a code that means nothing. Lode never lets your past records become ambiguous. The gaps are the receipts.

Photos are private by construction. Every image you attach is visible to your account and no one else.

Search reaches everything. The main page shows parents, but the search box matches children too — by name or by code. Type ip7-0003 or 'corkscrew' and land on the thing itself, in the context of its family.