The whole idea
How HomeStock works
There are only three things to understand: spaces, invites and permissions. Everything else follows from those.
Getting going
From nothing to useful
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Make an account
An email address and a password. Open HomeStock in a browser and choose "Sign up" — there's nothing to install and nothing to pay.
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Make a space
A space is a place you keep things: your own flat, the family house, a storeroom at work. You pick which kind it is — Personal, Household or Business — and that decides what tools it gets.
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Say where things live
Build up the places inside it, as deep as you actually need: a property, a building, a room, a shelf. The garage freezer and the kitchen freezer are different places, and knowing which one something is in is most of the value.
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Put your things in
Add them by hand, scan a barcode with your phone's camera, or — for a business with a catalogue already in a spreadsheet — import the file. Set how many of something you like to keep in, and HomeStock tells you when you drop below it.
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Invite the people who share it
Invite by email address. They'll see the invitation waiting for them the next time they open HomeStock, and they accept it there.
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Decide what each of them can do
New members start able to look and nothing more. You then grant exactly what you want them to have, one capability at a time.
Spaces
You can have as many as you like
Spaces don't see each other. What's in your Personal space isn't in the household one, and the shop's storeroom is nothing to do with either. You switch between them from the home screen, and each keeps its own things, its own places and its own people.
Most people end up with two or three: one for themselves, one for the house, and — if they run something — one for work. There's no limit on how many kinds you can mix.
What each kind gives you
Your own things, nobody invited. Inventory, lists, reminders, expiry dates, and your own money side if you want it.
Everything Personal has, shared. Plus requests, shared costs and who owes who, household bills and budgets, and recipes checked against what's in.
A full stock ledger with costs, purchase orders, suppliers, counts, transfers, staff hours and pay. More on this →
Invites
What actually happens when you invite somebody
You enter their email address and HomeStock creates the invitation. It does not send an email. The invitation appears on their home screen the next time they open HomeStock, and they accept it there.
So tell them you've invited them. If they're waiting on an email, they'll be waiting a long time — and we'd rather say that plainly here than have the app claim it sent something it didn't.
Removing somebody takes their access away straight away, and cancels any invitation of theirs that hadn't been accepted yet, so it can't be used to get back in.
Permissions
Set per person, not per job title
HomeStock doesn't have a fixed list of roles that decides what you can do. The person who owns a space grants capabilities to each individual: add stock, remove stock, see costs, see wages, manage the shopping list, manage people.
That's deliberate. A job title in an app is never quite the job title in the building, and a system that insists somebody is an "admin" when they're really the person who does the Tuesday count causes more confusion than it saves.
New members can look and nothing else until you say otherwise — the safe direction to be wrong in.
When the signal goes
It keeps working offline
Your changes are saved on your device first and sent up when there's a connection, so a cold storeroom, a basement freezer or a bad bit of the car park doesn't stop you working.
If two people change the same thing while one of them is offline, HomeStock keeps the newer change and tells the other person it did rather than silently choosing. If it can't save something at all, it says so at the top of the screen and keeps trying — it won't pretend a change landed when it didn't.