What you get with Prepper Supply Tracker, the world's leading Prepper Inventory and Food Storage App

Introduction

Managing your prepper pantry inventory can be a huge pain. There are lots of things to keep track of that you will likely forget to check periodically. Things like:

• How much of each category of preps/food you have
• Where the items are in your house or bug out location
• Expiration dates (though you can go beyond them with certain types of food like rice, you should still know this to avoid spillage for food items not as durable)
• Sorting your food items by expiration date so that it is easier to eat or giveaway the stuff that expires first
• etc, etc

In the app market, there exists tons of apps for scanning food and somewhat keeping track of your inventory, but none really cater to the special needs of preppers.

We're preppers as well and searched high and low but couldn't find anything to meet our needs. Managing your preps on Excel or csv files is ok, but that gets old very fast and will demotivate you after sometime.

That's when we decided to build version 1 of the Prepper Supply Tracker so that we could tame our prepper food storage and supply to avoid letting food go bad and potentially lose thousands of hard earned dollars in the process.

Being that our application is a web app, it naturally works on all popular platforms and form factors:

• Works well on Android browsers
• Works well on iPhone browsers
• Works well on a tablet like iPad's browsers
• Works on a desktop/laptop browser

One thing to note though, is that we optimized the application look and feel for mobile since that is what people use the most these days. It works on desktop/laptop computers, but looks better on mobile (we might change this in the future so that it looks great everywhere).

If this is your first time seeing this application, here is a quick video describing what we do:

If you prefer to watch a video instead of reading the material below. This video is long but broken down into sections with different timestamps you can jump around with:

Feature 1: Scanning UPC for item entry into your personal profile

The first thing any decent prepper inventory app should do is be able to scan UPCs. We do this easily and seamlessly with your phone camera. We have access to millions of items in our database, and not just food, we do almost everything: some electronics, first aid kits, Home Depot items, appliances, etc.

We are constantly adding new items to our database, so if your item is not found, don't worry. If you have problems getting it to scan your barcode, check this. Also to get rid of the annoying permission ask by your iPhone (if you have an iPhone) check this out

An additional great feature we have is adding items without a UPC like those jugs of water you have in your basement. You can literally add anything with this feature (UPC is not required to store items in the app).

So how does this work you ask? Upon logging into the application you will be greeted with the following screen:

As you can see, the application asks for a minimal set of fields by default because it tries to auto-discover the product details like the manufacturer, product category, name, etc.

If we have the UPC in our database, it will add this data plus nutritional data if applicable (still in beta). You can also specify whether product expires or not, or if you would like to manually enter the details (we will discuss this in the next section).

Feature 2: Scanning UPC items not in the database or other items with no UPC, i.e. a wrench, radio, whatever you want

For manual items without a barcode or items you scanned that are not in our database, you have the option to add it manually into the database. It is just like the screen above, just with the additional of the Category, Manufacturer, and Barcode fields:

Notice the "Manually Enter Product?" is checked. This must be done in order to use this feature. If you are adding a product without a barcode, you can put anything in the Barcode field, e.g. N/A, 1234, whatever.

When taking a picture of the product, please take a picture of the front of the product or anything making it easy for you to identify it.

Feature 3: Viewing recently entered items

Recently added items remain in the "Recently Added Items" queue until you log out, at which point they are removed from the recents. They're permanently in your "View Items" queue and any "Locations" you have move them to.

Here is what an example of a recently scanned item will look like:

Notice the legend in the screen, indicating what state your preps are in:

• Expired (red colored title)
• Within Expiration Timeframe (yellow colored title)
• Needs attention (blue colored title)

Expired items will look like this:

Within Expiration Timeframe (expiration timeframe you set in your settings, i.e. "send me an email 6 months before my food expires"):

Needs attention (this is applicable to a product with multiple expiration dates where at least one product is within the expiration timeframe you set or has expired):

Notice the Expiration Date has a select dropdown for multiple expiration dates. The application supports multiple expiration per products. If any of them are about to expire or have expired, the product will be labelled with "Needs Attention"

Feature 4: Viewing all of your items

You can view all of your items by clicking on the "View Items" link in the black navigation pane. You will see all of your items and can easily search with text autocompletion or by taking a picture of the barcode.

Here are some screenshots:

These are the categories for your preps.

Scrolling downwards, we see the preps pie chart, with the "Download as PDF" and "Download as CSV" (which is a spreadsheet of your items you can open in Excel). We also see the search bar we mentioned before:

Scrolling downwards even further, you can see all of your food and items preps. Let's talk about going offline and viewing your preps in a spreadsheet or as a pdf

Feature 5: Prepper pantry CSV download for Excel spreadsheet

Take a look at a sample prepper spreadsheet and prepper pdf by clicking on those links. You can do the same thing with your preps and keep offline copies in case the grid/internet go down. Print it out or keep it on your computer. It's your data and it will not remain a prisoner on our site.

Feature 6: Creating your prepper locations

One of the best features of the app is the ability to create arbitrary locations to organize your preps as they are in real life. What do I mean by this? Some preppers choose to spread out their preps in different physical locations.

You may have some of your stuff across multiple shelves in your basement, attic, pantry area, etc. The application lets you create any locations you want and it is easy to add items from your "View Items" queue.

Here is a screen shot of the Locations screen:

Here you see the locations and the total amount of preps (by quantity) for the location. You can view or remove the location easily. To remove it, just click on "Remove Location" (it will ask you if you're sure because you can't undo this operation).

Clicking on the blue area with the location name/quantity, opens up the location for viewing and adding items to it. You can create new locations by just clicking on the "Create New Location" button.

This is what you would see if you click on a location:

Similar to "View Items", you can see the categorical breakdown and pie chart. In addition you have the autocomplete and camera barcode/UPC search feature to easily find things in your locations:

Example rice item in your Location:

Feature 7: Adjusting the settings

Taking a look at the settings screen, we can see lots of different options. Here is a list of those options:

• Change your Avatar
• Change your name
• Change your email
• Change your city, state/province, and country
• Change your password
• Change the way the application and reports sort items by expiration
• Change your expiration notification time
• Change how often the trash is emptied in your application
• Change how similar items are merged (more on this later)
• Change your subscription plan (monthly or yearly)

Here are some screen shots:

Now let's get into some of the settings that need a bit of explanation. First one:

• Sort Items By Expiry

This basically controls how you see your preps in "View Items" and "Locations". If you choose "Ascending order" as your sort order, you will see your preps sorted from the first to expire to the last that expires.

For instance let's say you have 2 items, in ascending order they will look like this:

• Rice, expiration date Nov 1, 2021
• Beans, expiration date Dec 1, 2027

In descending order they will look like this:

• Beans, expiration date Dec 1, 2027
• Rice, expiration date Nov 1, 2021

Another one needing explaining is the "Merge Simliar items by" feature. This feature exclusively deals with duplicate items with different expiration dates. For instance let's say you have some Ramen noodles with 3 different expiration dates:

• June 2, 2021
• Feb 26, 2021
• Oct 19, 2021

Here is a screen shot of what it looks like when it is merged:

Notice the Expiration Date select box. Since we have multiple Ramen noodles with the same barcode/UPC, they will be merged by default, and you will be able to choose the one you want to view or modify by selecting the appropriate date.

There are three options for this merge feature. They are:

• Take information of the first item for merge
• Take information of the latest item for merge
• Don't merge

"Don't merge" simply tells the application not to merge similar items (items with the same barcode). You will see each entry in "View Items" and "Locations" screen.

The other tell the application which title (which is the "Product Label" you used when adding the item to your preps) to choose when similar items are merged. Let's say you added the following items to your preps with these Product Labels:

• My Ramen Noodle, UPC: 123, added on 12-1-2020 4pm
• John's Ramen Noodle, UPC: 123, added on 12-2-2020 1pm

If the merge option you choose was "Take information of the first item for merge", then the title of the merged items will be:

• My Ramen Noodle

Since it was the first one you added to your preps. If you choose merge option "Take information of the latest item for merge", then the title of the merged items will be:

• John's Ramen Noodle

Since it was the latest Ramen noodle you added to your preps.

Feature 8: Viewing your email expiration notifications

Emails are sent to you when Prepper Supply Tracker has detected items fall within the expiration timeframe you established in your settings (or the default settings if you haven't changed it). They will look like this in your inbox:

If you haven't received any of the emails, check your spam filter for an email from expiration_bot [at] preppersupplytracker.com.

Remove it from spam and put it into your inbox. Depending on your email provider, this is a strong enough signal for it to not get blocked in the future

Conclusion

We covered a lot (enough for you to go and experiment with), now it's time to become a member if you're not. In summary you will get the following:

• Ability to scan UPC items and store them
• Ability to store items without a UPC (anything you want with a photo)
• Ability to create locations to segregate your pantry items to reflect you real world partitioning
• Ability to offline your preps via downloading Excel compatible files and PDF
• Ability to receive email notifications for expiring items so that you don't lose money on things going bad

Give us a try by either starting with free trial or one of our cheap paid options

Feel free to contact us here