Watch Vault Archive is private desktop software for cataloging a watch
collection — insurance schedules, appraisals, service history,
provenance and succession, held encrypted on your own computer. There is no cloud, no account with us, and
no company holding a copy of what you own.
It is the replacement for the spreadsheet most collectors outgrow. A
spreadsheet holds the data but produces nothing: no insurance schedule, no
estate register, no service due dates, no attached appraisals, and no
encryption worth the name.
Who it’s for
Built for a collection of five, and one of five hundred.
Nearly every collection starts with two or three watches and a spreadsheet
that has already become annoying. It ends up somewhere none of us planned.
Most collectors are more than one of the following at once and move between
them over years — so these are stages, not categories, and the record you
start at the first is the one that still works at the last.
You have a handful of pieces and a spreadsheet, or nothing at all. What matters now is starting a record you will not have to rebuild later — and learning what a service costs before it surprises you.
The collection has outgrown memory. Some pieces are worth insuring and some are not, you are tracking what you want as well as what you own, and you need to know which is which without opening five files.
You sell as well as buy. That means cost basis, duties, shipping, servicing and commission — and a "sold or lost" figure that is honest rather than the one that flatters you.
Enough value that an underwriter, an executor or an appraiser will eventually read your records. Provenance, scheduled values and an estate register stop being optional.
Privacy and discretion
A collection worth insuring is worth keeping private.
Most collection apps ask you to upload photographs, serial numbers and
valuations to somebody else’s server. That creates a single,
attractive list of what you own and where you live.
No servers
There is nothing to breach.
No password to be leaked in someone else’s data breach. Your
collection exists on your computer, and anywhere else only as a file you chose to make.
Offline by design
The application makes no network requests.
This is not a setting you have to trust us to honor, and not a
promise of restraint. The window that holds your collection is blocked
from making network connections, and the app's own code opens none.
It works exactly the same on a laptop that has never been online.
Encrypted at rest
A stolen laptop reveals none of your collection.
Everything — watches, values, serial numbers, photographs and attached
documents — is encrypted on disk. Someone who
takes the computer, removes the drive and reads it directly gets
unreadable data. There is no lock to pick, because the information
itself is scrambled. The one exception is a document you print: so your
browser can open it, it waits unencrypted in the app's own temporary
folder until the app quits or next starts.
Confidential
We cannot see your collection, even if asked.
The key that opens your collection is unlocked by a passphrase that only you
hold, and neither ever leaves your computer. There is no mechanism by which we
could produce your data for anyone — a support request, an insurer, or a subpoena. We simply
do not have it.
What the software does
The unglamorous work, done properly.
It is built around the records a collection actually accumulates. That is
why it handles the
tedious, consequential things carefully and none of the flashy things at
all.
01
Appraisals and insurance schedules
Produce a scheduled property inventory — every piece, reference, serial number, market value, replacement cost
and scheduled value — to hand to an underwriter or
attach to a claim. Anything worth more than it is covered for is flagged
before you find out the hard way. Formal appraisals, invoices and
warranty cards attach to the record. A
renewal line surfaces automatically inside sixty days of a policy’s
date, naming the insurer and the date, and setting the scheduled total
beside what the watches on it would cost to replace.
02
Service history
Log every service, the house that performed it, what it cost and when
the next is due. Where no full service has been recorded, the next one
is counted from the purchase date and marked Estimated. A watch sent to
a watchmaker and not yet back shows under Out for service. A complete, dated service record is part of what a
piece is worth — and it is among the first things a serious buyer or an
estate appraiser will ask to see.
03
Provenance
Where a piece came from, who owned it before you, the box and papers,
the auction lot, the story. Held with the record rather than in a drawer
of receipts.
04
Succession
An estate register prints what your executor will actually need: what
these pieces are, what they are worth, which you intend for a named
person and which may be sold. You can also leave an encrypted copy of
the whole collection with your estate documents.
05
An honest position
Two figures, deliberately kept apart. What the collection might be worth
today, from your own valuations — an estimate. And what actually
happened when you sold: hammer price, less commission, less what the
watch cost you to buy — price, duties and shipping. Servicing sits
alongside it as a cost of ownership, not buried inside the trade.
06
The hunt
Mark a piece as sought and it sits in the collection as part of the chase
— excluded from every financial total and from both printed documents, because you
do not own it yet. Record the purchase and it joins the collection on
its own.
07
Insights
A timeline of what the collection was made of, on any date it changed
— grouped by category or brand, measured by count or cost
basis. Nothing is stored separately; it is read straight back
from the purchase and disposal dates already on the pieces, rather than
kept as a second copy that could drift from them.
08
Rate, amplitude and beat error
Record what a timing run measured and compare it against the tolerance
you choose — COSC, METAS Master Chronometer, Grand Seiko, Rolex’s
Superlative standard, or a plain ±10 seconds a day. The
application compares; it does not certify. Amplitude and beat error sit
alongside as the two numbers on a timing sheet that say a watch is
heading for a service.
A working example of a sample transaction
A dive chronograph, bought at auction for $2,810, plus $80 in duties and
shipping — a cost basis of $2,890. Today’s market value is
$7,500Provenance. Compare only to the
purchase price and the gain looks like $4,690; against what the watch
actually cost to acquire it is $4,610. One service call
for $615 is carried separately — so you can see the trade and the upkeep without
either one hiding the other.
A watch record holds a great deal. The story is what you choose to
make from it: the photographs, how the watch came to you, what has been
done to it, and your own note about why you keep it. There are no prices
or valuations in it, because that is not what a watch means to you, and
it is not what you would want read out.
What is in it
The photograph first, then the history.
Matted rather than cropped, so a careful phone shot carries the same
weight as a studio one. Then how the watch was acquired and who has
owned it, written as prose rather than fields. What it is.
Originality, component by component. Mechanical health, verdict
first. The remaining photographs, captioned. How it is kept, and
what should happen to it.
Your own words, last
A note about why you keep it.
Optional, never required, and written by you rather than generated
for you. It carries the date you wrote it rather than the date the
file was saved, and it sits apart from everything else — closer to a
note left inside a book than to the rest of the document.
Yours to give
The one thing here meant to leave.
It reads on its own page in the application and saves as a single
file. Print it, keep it, or hand it to whoever should have it. It is
your account, in your words — nothing in it was issued by a
manufacturer or an appraiser, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Sections with nothing recorded are left out rather than padded, so a
thinly documented watch produces a shorter document. Every watch is
honest; not every watch is equally impressive.
Security and encryption
One key, held only by you.
The collection is protected with AES-256 encryption — the standard used to
protect classified government information and banking systems.
Your passphrase
The only thing that opens it.
The application opens locked and stays locked until you enter it. It
locks itself again on an idle timer, and locking discards the key
entirely — a locked collection is not a screen drawn over readable data.
There is nothing to read.
Recovery key
A second way in, on paper.
A recovery key is shown during setup, to be written down by hand.
It opens the collection independently of your passphrase, and belongs
where your important documents live — a safe, a deposit box, or with
your attorney. There is deliberately no Print button: printing would
leave the key unencrypted on the very computer it exists to protect.
The recovery-key screen also offers an optional digital copy for a
password manager; keep the written copy as well.
Backups
An encrypted file you control.
Save an encrypted backup of the entire collection — photographs and
documents included — as a single file, to keep on a drive in a safe.
It opens only with your passphrase or recovery key, so where it rests
matters far less than it otherwise would. On a Mac, the app can also
write one automatically, every week or every day, to a folder you
choose.
There is no reset
No backdoor, no escrow, no support line that can let you back in. If you
lose both your passphrase and your recovery key, the collection cannot be
opened by anyone, permanently. Any door that could let you back in could
let someone else in too. We would rather tell you this now than at the worst
possible moment.
A collection like this gets reviewed a few times a year — checking
provenance, confirming coverage, deciding what happens to it — not checked
on the subway. That is a sit-down task, and building a synced companion for
it would mean solving a different problem than the one this app was built
to solve.
What syncing to a phone requires
A server holding a master copy, so two devices have something to compare against
Or that same server resolving conflicts when you edit from both at once
What Watch Vault Archive does instead
One copy, on one computer, that has never been reachable from anywhere else
Moving it is a deliberate act — save an encrypted backup, carry it yourself — never a background sync you stopped watching
Also from the publisher
Watch Vault Tracker
Free for 30 days, then $4.99 once. For iPhone, iPad and Mac. Coming Early 2027.
It records which watch you wear, one tap a day. It is a separate app,
not a phone version of this one, and the two never connect. A list of
watches can move between them as a file you carry, never your wearing
records.
Also from the publisher
Watch Vault Insurance
Coming 2027.
Coverage for the watches you care about. Designed for collectors, it
will provide a straightforward way to insure individual watches or an
entire collection against risks such as theft, loss and accidental
damage, through an established insurance partner. The details you
maintain for your watches in Watch Vault Archive — including
photographs, serial numbers, purchase records, appraisals and values
— can help make managing insurance easier.
A personal licence, perpetual for the major release you buy and
including the updates within it, at the same price for five watches or
five hundred. Nothing can be switched off out from under your records,
because the software does not depend on anything we run.
Use inside a dealership or auction house, or by anyone holding
inventory to sell, requires a separate commercial licence, which is a
conversation rather than a checkout:
legal@watchvaultarchive.com.
