Eleven stickers and a camera
One large sticker goes inside the electrical panel and registers the building. Ten small ones go on the things worth remembering. Nothing has to be filled in for the stickers to start being useful.
The panel sticker goes up
Inside the electrical panel door. It is a place every building has, that nobody redecorates, and that people already go looking for when something is wrong.
Scanning it now already gives a working page. Everything after this makes that page better.
Say where the shutoffs are
Water, gas, the main panel. Two minutes of typing, and it is the part that pays for itself the first time somebody needs it and you are not there.
Small stickers go on the equipment
HVAC, water heater, appliances, the mower. Photograph the data plate or type the model — on most of them the number is printed on the side anyway.
The people who service it fill in the rest
A contractor scans the sticker and sees what they did last time, which is the question they actually want answered. Logging the visit takes seconds, and the record fills in as a by-product.
That is deliberately backwards from how maintenance software usually works. Technicians do not do data entry that only benefits somebody else.
It reminds you before it matters
Filters, a mower service, a septic pump-out, an extinguisher inspection. This is also the only reason anybody opens a building record more than twice a decade — which is what killed every product that tried this before.
It goes with the building
When the property sells the seller chooses what transfers, asset by asset. The new owner's first scan says who installed what and what is still under warranty, and the contractor who looked after it for nine years does not silently lose the customer.
The rule that makes it work
Every tag resolves to the building first, and to the thing it is stuck to second.
So the sticker on the mower in the garage still answers “where is the water shutoff”. Nobody in an emergency is going to hunt for the right sticker, and a product that expects them to has already failed.
A tag is not the thing it is on
When the condenser is replaced, the sticker moves to the new unit and the history stays with the location. The record is about the building, not about a particular box of metal that happened to be in it for a while.