The Adjuster Asks What It Cost and When You Bought It
A burglary claim in South Africa typically triggers a claims assessor who wants three things: the item description, the purchase price or estimated replacement value, and proof that you owned it. Without a home inventory, you're reconstructing that list from memory under stress, for hundreds of items, trying to remember which items went missing versus which were always missing, and whether the television was bought three years ago or five.
This template is the pre-loss inventory that makes the post-loss claim a data export, not a memory exercise.
General Item vs Specified Item: The Insurance Architecture
Two boolean fields — General Item and Specified Item — map every entry to its insurance treatment. General contents cover is an aggregate limit that protects all household items collectively up to a ceiling without listing individual items. Specified items are declared to the insurer individually, photographed, valued, and covered against the full replacement cost at their declared value — typically required for jewellery, firearms, fine art, musical instruments, and high-value electronics that exceed the single-item sub-limit in a general contents policy.
A ring purchased for R45,000 recorded as General Item is only recoverable up to the per-item sub-limit of the general policy — often R5,000 to R10,000. The same ring recorded as Specified Item with a Valuation Certificate attached and declared to the insurer at R45,000 is covered for R45,000. The Proof of Purchase file field and Valuation Certificate file field store the documentation that makes the Specified Item claim payable.
The Wine Cellar Within the Inventory
The Wine category fields — Wine Type, Varietal, Region, Sub Region, Bottle Size, Drink From, Drink To, and the Drink boolean — turn the wine section of the inventory into a functional cellar management record layered onto the insurance documentation.
Drink From and Drink To define the drinking window. A 2018 Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon with a window of 2024–2032 is at its optimal period now. A 2020 Chardonnay with Drink To = 2024 is past window. The Drink boolean flags bottles currently in the ready-to-drink phase — the active cellar list.
Bottle Size matters for valuation: a 1500ml magnum of a premium Pinotage is not twice the value of two 750ml bottles of the same wine. Premium formats carry a multiplier that replacement value must reflect. A cellar of 200 bottles, properly documented with vintage, varietal, region, and bottle size, produces a defensible insurance valuation that a contents claim against an undocumented "some wine" entry cannot.
Die-Cast Cars and the Scale Field
The Scale multichoice — 1:18, 1:24, 1:43, 1:76 — exists because die-cast scale determines value range. A 1:18 Autoart model of a limited Ferrari variant retails at R2,500–R8,000. A 1:43 standard Corgi of the same car retails at R200. Both are "die-cast cars" without scale notation; neither is correctly valued without it. The Colour field adds the variant specification that further determines value for limited production runs where the same model in a specific livery commands a significant premium over other colours.
Cost Assumed and Replacement Value Assumed
Both cost and replacement value have "Assumed" boolean companions. Cost Assumed marks items where no receipt exists and the purchase price is an estimate — the R3,200 for the bedroom curtains bought eight years ago at a shop that's since closed. Replacement Value Assumed marks items where current market pricing hasn't been formally verified. These flags are honest uncertainty markers that survive into the claims process: an adjuster who sees "Cost Assumed = true" for ten items knows those figures need independent verification; one who sees zero Assumed flags knows the inventory was built on documented values.
Value Date records when the replacement value was last assessed. An inventory built in 2019 with all values anchored to 2019 pricing underestimates replacement cost significantly given South African CPI and the depreciation of ZAR against import-priced electronics and appliances. Items flagged for review are the ones where Value Date is more than two years old.
The forty asset categories — from Appliances and Audio Visual through to Wine and Watches — cover the full household. The Room multichoice maps contents to twenty locations including the Wendy house, Scullery, Boys Bathroom, and both children's rooms named by occupant. At the Bin level, specific storage locations within a room pinpoint exactly where a documented item lives — critical for stored items whose location might otherwise be disputed in a post-loss scenario.