Kits

Kits

Kits let you group equipment with its accessories so everything stays together—cameras with lenses, tools with components, and devices with chargers.

Why Kits Matter

Accessories are the most commonly lost items in any equipment operation:

• Missing accessories: Chargers, cables, batteries, and adapters disappear without anyone noticing.
• Mismatched sets: Components end up with the wrong parent items, creating confusion.
• Confusion during check-in: Staff can't tell what's missing when items return incomplete.
• Manual checking slows operations: Verifying every component by hand creates bottlenecks.

Kits solve these problems by defining what belongs together—and automatically tracking completeness.

How Kits Work in Shelf

Parent + Child Items

A kit consists of a parent item (like a camera) and its child items (lenses, batteries, cables, cases). Shelf knows what belongs together and tracks each component.

Quantity-Tracked Stock in Kits

Kits aren't limited to individually tracked items. You can include quantity-tracked stock — supplies and consumables managed by count — in a kit, and the kit handles custody by quantity.

Kits bundle assets; the tracking method is set per asset. Here is how to choose one.

Kit-Aware Bookings

When users book a kit, all its accessories come along. No need to reserve each item separately—the entire bundle is scheduled as one unit.

See: Bookings

Missing Item Detection

During check-in, Shelf compares what's returned against what should be in the kit. If something is missing, the system flags it immediately—no manual counting required.

Workspaces that work mostly with kits can also count each kit as a single unit on the booking check-in progress bar, so a large kit reads as one item to return rather than dozens.

Custody & Location Sync

Kit items inherit updates from the parent. When custody or location changes for the kit, all child items update automatically.

Moving a kit is a single action, done from the kit page, from a multi-select on the Kits index, or by scanning the kit's QR code with the scanner set to Update location. Every asset inside lands at the new location, and each one records the move in its own activity history so the trail shows it came from the kit. Quantity-tracked stock only moves the slice the kit holds; the rest of the pool stays where you put it. Unpack the kit later and its individually tracked assets stay at the location the kit left them at, rather than reverting to unplaced.

See: Custody · Kit location, step by step

Benefits

• Reduces accessory loss by tracking every component
• Faster check-in/out with automatic completeness verification
• Eliminates accessory chaos with clear parent-child relationships
• Perfect for media and education where kits are standard practice
• Scales across departments with kit definitions that can be reused

Related Features

• Bookings
• Custody
• Location Tracking
• Consumables Tracking