Whether it was stolen off a set, dropped on a shoot, or walked out of a rental van — the claim goes better when the paperwork already exists.

The worst time to build an inventory is the day after you needed one.

A camera gets lifted from a location. A lens hits concrete. A case doesn’t come off the truck. Now you’re filing a claim, and the adjuster wants to know exactly what you had, what it was worth, and proof it existed — and you’re reconstructing it from memory, old emails, and a spreadsheet last updated a year ago.

This guide covers what insurers actually ask for, and how to have it ready before the bad day. If you take one thing from it: the documentation is easy to build in advance and nearly impossible to build after the fact.

This is general guidance, not insurance or legal advice. Every policy is different — read yours, and ask your provider what they require.

WHAT AN INSURER TYPICALLY WANTS

Claims vary, but almost every one comes down to answering four questions convincingly:

What did you own? An itemized list — make, model, and ideally serial number for each piece. “A bunch of camera gear” is not a claim. “Sony FX6, serial 1234567” is.

What was it worth? A value for each item, and something to back it up — a purchase price, a receipt, or a defensible current value. Insurers pay depreciated value on a lot of policies, so a current-value number helps.

Can you prove it existed and was yours? Receipts are the gold standard. Photos are strong support. A dated record showing the item in your inventory before the loss carries real weight.

What happened, and when? For damage or theft: what occurred, the date, and any supporting evidence — photos of the damage, a police report number for theft, the shoot it happened on.

The pattern: specific, itemized, dated, and evidenced beats a lump-sum estimate every time — both for whether you get paid and for how much.

THE DOCUMENTATION TO BUILD BEFORE ANYTHING HAPPENS

This is the whole game. An adjuster treats a maintained, dated inventory very differently from a list you typed up the week of the claim.

An itemized inventory with serial numbers. Every real piece of gear, with make, model, and serial. Serial numbers matter twice: they prove the specific item was yours, and if stolen gear surfaces, they’re how it’s identified.

A value on every item. What you paid, or a current market value. Keep it current — a value you set three years ago is easy for an adjuster to discount.

Photos of the actual gear. Not catalog images — your gear. The body with its wear, the case, the serial plate. Photograph serial numbers specifically; it’s tedious and it’s exactly what you’ll wish you had.

Receipts where you have them. Attach or file them against the item. You won’t have one for everything; have them where you can.

Proof it existed before the loss. This is the piece people miss. A dated inventory record — one an insurer can see predates the incident — answers “was this yours and did you actually have it?” in a way a freshly-typed list can’t.

WHAT TO CAPTURE WHEN IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

The moment you discover damage, loss, or theft, capture it while it’s fresh:

Photograph the damage immediately, from several angles, ideally with something that establishes the date. “It came back cracked” is a claim of damage; a timestamped photo is the damage, on the record.

Note the date, the shoot, and who had it. If gear failed or vanished on a specific production, that context matters — and if someone else had custody, that’s part of the story.

File a police report for theft, and keep the report number. Most policies require it, and most have a filing deadline measured in days.

Don’t fix or discard anything until you’ve documented it and checked whether your insurer needs to see it first. Repairing damage before it’s assessed can complicate the claim.

HOW TO HAVE ALL OF THIS READY WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT

Here’s where a gear management tool stops being about convenience and starts being about money.

If your inventory already lives in Javi, most of that “before” list is just… there, as a byproduct of tracking gear day to day:

The itemized list, values, and photos are the inventory itself — make, model, serial, value, and images on every item, current because you use it.

The dated record exists because items were added and tracked over time — a history that predates the incident, rather than a document created the week of the claim.

The damage evidence is what flags are for: photograph a scuff or a malfunction from your phone, and it’s attached to that item with your name and the date on it — the timestamped proof an adjuster wants, captured the moment it happened on set.

The custody trail — who had the item, on which shoot, when — is already recorded from checkout, so “what happened and who had it” answers itself.

None of that requires prep for a claim. It’s the residue of tracking gear properly, and it happens to be exactly the file an insurer asks for.

Export it when you need it. On the Enterprise plan you can export your gear inventory — handy when an adjuster wants the whole list in a file.