PCS Before you move
Stage one: Before Packing Day. This is the only stage with real homework, and it's the one that makes every later stage easy. You film; the app builds your inventory.
Why bother? Anything the movers don't except in writing is legally presumed to have left your house in good condition. Your before-video is how you prove what "good condition" actually looked like — and later, it's what your damage photo gets matched against.
Start with House Setup
Open House Setup from your Home list and tell the app what rooms you have — three bedrooms, a garage, a living room, and so on. Use the − and + steppers, and add anything unusual as a custom room.
This is just the plan for what you're about to film. You can change it any time, including after you've started sending rooms: a room you've already filmed can't be removed by accident, but new rooms can be added whenever you find one you forgot.
Record House Videos
Record House Videos opens a grid with one tile per room. Unfilmed rooms show a dashed outline; filmed rooms show a frame from your video with a status pill on it.
Work through them at your own pace, over days or weeks. Nothing has to happen in one sitting.
Each tile's pill tells you where that room stands:
| Pill | What it means |
|---|---|
| Preparing | Your phone is pulling still frames out of the video. Wait for this to finish before sending. |
| Queued | Ready to go. It sends when you tap Send for Processing. |
| Processing | Sent. Our servers are building your item list. Up to 24 hours. |
| ✓ Processed | Done. The room's items are in your catalog. |
| Retry | Something went wrong. Tap in — the app tells you whether to try again or refilm. |
Long-press a tile to rename or delete a room. Tap a tile to open the room: watch your video full-screen, add detail shots, retry a failure, or refilm it.
Refilming is safe. If you refilm a room that already processed, anything you typed or touched yourself is kept — renamed items, values, serial numbers, damage you already logged. Only the untouched machine-generated items from the old take are retired.
How to film a room
The rule is simple: one continuous video per room. Don't stop and start; don't shoot separate clips of separate corners. Walk the room.
- Turn the lights on and open the blinds. The app is reading your footage frame by frame — it can only catalog what it can see.
- Start at the door and walk the walls. Slow and steady. Faster than a stroll and the frames blur.
- Open what's closed. Closets, drawers, cabinets, the garage shelving. What's inside is what gets claimed later.
- Pause a beat on anything expensive. A couple of seconds pointed at the TV, the mountain bike, the tool chest — that's the frame the app will pick.
- Talk if you want. Naming things out loud as you pass them ("that's my grandmother's china cabinet") helps the app get names right.
A room takes about three to four minutes. A whole house is usually 30–45 minutes of filming, spread over as many days as you like.
In the app, the How do I film a room? link on the House Videos screen has the same rules in short form, right where you're standing.
Your videos never leave your phone. The app extracts still keyframes on the device and uploads only those. That's also why the raw videos aren't in your vault export — they're gigabytes, and they're not what a claim runs on. Keep the phone that filmed them until your claim is closed.
Detail shots
Inside a room you can add detail shots — up to 10 per room. These are close-ups that a walkthrough pan can't do justice:
- A serial number or model plate, with the item powered on if it has a screen.
- Existing damage you already know about — the scratch that was there before the movers arrived. Documenting it protects you from being blamed for it, and stops you claiming something that isn't theirs.
- A receipt or appraisal for something valuable.
- The maker's mark on furniture, a signature on artwork, anything that proves what a thing actually is.
Snap one and the camera closes, dropping you back on the room where the new shot appears in the strip. The dashed tile is how you start the next one.
Send for Processing
Nothing is sent automatically. When rooms are ready, tap Send for Processing at the bottom of the House Videos screen.
Then:
- Processing takes up to 24 hours. You'll get an email — and a push notification on the native app — when your catalog is ready.
- You can close the app. Processing runs on our servers, not your phone.
- No signal? The send waits and goes on its own when you're back in coverage.
- Rooms you film later send on their own schedule. Film a forgotten room next week, hit Send again, and it processes and joins your catalog without disturbing anything already there.
Your Catalog tab shows a build card while rooms are still processing, so you always know whether the app is working or waiting on you.
Review your catalog
When processing finishes, the Review Your Catalog task lights up on Home and your Catalog tab fills in: every item the app found, room by room, each with its own frame pulled from the video it appeared in.
The top of the Catalog tab shows two numbers — how many items were catalogued and an estimated shipment weight. The weight is an estimate built from item types, sizes and materials, the same way a mover's pre-move surveyor eyeballs it. Treat it as a ballpark, not a scale reading.
Open an item to see and edit its details: name, description, category, color, brand, material, and its estimated weight.
What to actually do here:
- Skim, don't audit. You're checking that nothing valuable is missing and nothing is badly misnamed.
- Fix names that matter. "Sofa" is fine. If the app called your $3,000 sectional a "chair", fix that one.
- Delete what isn't shipping. Sold it, gave it away, driving it yourself? Delete it. Deleting an item never destroys damage photos already attached to it.
- Add anything the camera missed with the Add Item button. A photo is optional — you can type an item in by hand.
Once you've edited an item, later processing leaves your version alone. Your edits win.
High Value Items
High Value Items is a separate list from your catalog, and it's the one the movers care about. The rule the app uses: anything that is worth over $100 per pound.
Jewelry, cameras, laptops, firearms, coin and stamp collections, watches, small electronics — the dense, expensive things. A 400-pound sofa worth $2,000 is not high value; a two-pound camera worth $2,000 is.
- Tap the amber tile on the House Videos screen (or the High Value Item List task on Home).
- Snap a close-up of the item.
- Name it, and add a value and serial number if you have them.
- Add more angles from the item's own screen if one photo doesn't tell the story.
Build this list before pack-out. On packing day the crew hands you a high-value inventory form to fill out, and the app turns this list into exactly what you copy onto it — see the high-value form.
Split moves: assigning items to a shipment
If you have both HHG (household goods) and UB (unaccompanied baggage), each high-value item belongs to exactly one of them — one item, one truck. The Assign High Value Items task deals your items out one at a time and asks which shipment each is going in.
After the first pass you get a two-shelf board: hold an item and drag it to the other shipment to move it. Get this right before pack-out and each crew's form comes out correct on the day.
Ready for packing day
You're done with this stage when your rooms are filmed and processed, your catalog has been looked over, and your high-value list is built.
When the crew is at your door, tap I'm at packing day → on Home to move into the next stage.