Build your equipment inventory
Get your gear into SAR21 — by hand, by spreadsheet import, or both — and set up asset IDs, categories, and the locations your equipment actually lives in.
About 6 minutesStep 5 of 19 in team setup
Add your first items
Go to Equipment and click Add equipment. Only a name and a category are required — everything else can be filled in later, so you can get a rough inventory down in one sitting and refine it over time.
Asset ID is the number or tag written on the gear itself. If your team already labels equipment, type what is on the sticker. If you have no numbering yet, see the next step.
- Name and category — the only required fields
- Asset ID, brand, model, and a photo — useful, not mandatory
- Condition — Serviceable unless you know otherwise
Let SAR21 suggest the next asset ID
Whoever is adding an item usually has no way of knowing which number is free. Open Equipment → Settings and turn on Asset ID numbering, then set a prefix (for example R-), how many digits, and where to start. The Add equipment form then offers the next free number as a one-click suggestion.
It only ever offers. The field stays free text, so equipment that arrived already numbered keeps its own tag, and the suggestion is worked out from the IDs already in use rather than from a stored counter that can drift out of step.
The feature is off by default, so a team with its own numbering scheme is unaffected.
Import an existing spreadsheet
Already tracking equipment in a spreadsheet? Go to Equipment → Import and export and choose a CSV. The file needs a Name column; Asset ID, Category, Brand, Model, and Notes are used if present, and anything else is ignored.
Nothing is written until you confirm. SAR21 shows a plan first — how many rows will be added, how many will update existing items, and every skipped row with its spreadsheet row number and the reason. Rows matching an asset ID already in your inventory update that item instead of creating a duplicate.
Importing only touches identity fields — name, asset ID, category, brand, model, notes. Where an item is and whether it works are left alone, because a spreadsheet is not evidence about that.
Describe where gear lives
Equipment → Locations lets you build the places your team keeps things, nested as deep as you need — station, vehicle, cache, bin, kit. Items are then filed against a real place rather than a typed-in string that ends up spelled a different way by every person who enters it.
This is optional. Teams with a single storage location can skip it entirely and never see a location field they do not use.
Export whenever you need it
The same Import and export page offers two downloads. The full inventory is every field, for a backup, an audit, or a report. The label print file is name, asset ID, category, and the QR payload — the format a commercial print shop needs, with nothing left for them to ask about.