Stackroom vs Sortly

A catalogue answers a different question from a lifecycle

Sortly's model is a visual catalogue: nested folders, photographs, custom fields. The question it answers is “what do we have”, and it answers it pleasantly — the photo-led interface is genuinely nicer than most asset software.

Stackroom's model is a lifecycle. An item is acquired with a purchase price and a depreciation method, tagged, issued to a named person who signs for it, returned with a condition record, sent for repair with a cost against it, covered by a warranty or an AMC with a policy number and a claim contact, counted in an audit that closes with a signature, and eventually retired. The register exists to run that sequence.

This is a different data model, not a missing feature list. Each stage has to know about the ones either side of it — an open maintenance ticket has to make an item unbookable; a leaver's record has to produce every item they hold; an audit finding has to stay attached to the asset. Bolting that onto a catalogue rarely works, which is why the two products stay distinct.

What item-count pricing does to a register

This is the most common reason teams tell us they looked elsewhere, and it is worth stating plainly because it is a structural effect rather than a complaint about price.

When the bill rises with the item count, every decision to register something has a cost attached. The predictable result is that the cheaper, numerous equipment gets left out to stay inside a tier — and that is exactly where quiet loss accumulates. A register with a deliberate hole in it is a weaker control than its coverage suggests, and the hole is always in the same place.

Stackroom prices on the team. Plans carry asset limits, but the ladder is driven by capability and organisation size rather than by how completely you track.

The four capabilities teams reach for next

**Signed custody.** Recording a holder is a value in a field; capturing a signature is evidence someone accepted responsibility. The distinction is invisible until the first time an item does not come back and a conversation gets difficult.

**Offboarding.** Everything a departing person holds, as a list, closing into an asset clearance certificate. Departures are the single most concentrated source of unrecovered equipment, almost entirely because nobody has the list.

**Audits.** A scoped cycle count walked on a phone, each item verified or missing, closed with a signature and a note — and the findings staying attached to the assets afterwards. That is a document an auditor can file.

**Service cover and book value.** Warranties, AMC and CMC contracts with policy numbers, claim contacts and renewal chains, plus straight-line or written-down-value depreciation. This is the half of the lifecycle that decides whether to repair or replace, and a catalogue has nowhere to put it.

Where Sortly is honestly better

Photo-led browsing. If people find things by looking at them rather than searching text, Sortly's interface is better than ours and we would not claim otherwise.

Stock counting. Sortly is an inventory product and counts stock properly. Stackroom is not competing there — we track equipment as identified items with a history, not as quantities to be reconciled, and if counting stock is the core of the job you are looking at the wrong category of tool in us.

Sheer simplicity where nothing is issued to anybody. If no item ever has a holder, most of what Stackroom adds is weight you would not use.