Private · Encrypted · Offline by design
Watch Register is a private register for significant collections — appraisals, service history, provenance and succession, held encrypted on your own machine. There is no cloud, no account, and no company holding a copy of what you own.
For macOS and Windows · A one-time licence, not a subscription
Discretion
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. Watch Register was built so that list cannot exist anywhere but your own machine.
No account to create, no password to be leaked in someone else’s data breach, no vendor database quietly holding an inventory of your watches. Your register exists on your machine and nowhere else.
This is not a setting you have to trust us to honour, and not a promise of restraint. The application is built without any network capability at all — no connection to make, no address to send to. It works exactly the same on a laptop that has never been online.
Everything — watches, values, serial numbers, photographs and attached documents — is stored as a single encrypted file. Someone who takes the machine, removes the drive and reads it directly gets unreadable data. There is no lock to pick, because the information itself is scrambled.
The key that opens your register is derived from a passphrase only you hold, and it never leaves your machine. There is no copy in escrow and 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.
The register
It began as one collector’s own record. That is why it handles the tedious, consequential things carefully and none of the flashy things at all.
Produce a scheduled property inventory — every piece, reference, serial number, appraised value and insured 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 and are encrypted alongside it.
Log every service, the house that performed it, what it cost and when the next is due. 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.
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, and encrypted with everything else.
An estate register prints what your executor will actually need: what these pieces are, what they are worth, which are promised to a named person and which may be sold. You can also leave an encrypted copy of the whole register with your estate documents.
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 you paid, duties, shipping and every service in between.
Mark a piece as sought and it sits in the register as part of the chase — excluded from every total and from both printed documents, because you do not own it yet. Record the purchase and it joins the collection on its own.
A worked example — why the second number is the real one
A watch bought for $4,000, serviced twice for $1,950, sold for $6,500 with $780 in fees looks like a $1,570 gain. It is actually a $380 loss. The disposition report shows both figures side by side, because only one of them is true.
Protection
The register is protected with AES-256 encryption — the standard used to protect classified government information and banking systems.
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 register is not a screen drawn over readable data. There is nothing to read.
A printable recovery key is shown once during setup. It opens the register independently of your passphrase, and is meant to be written down and stored where your important documents live — a safe, a deposit box, or with your attorney.
Export the entire register — photographs and documents included — as a single encrypted file. Keep it on a drive in a safe, or hand it to an executor. It is unreadable without your passphrase, so where it rests matters far less than it otherwise would.
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 register cannot be opened by anyone, permanently. That is the same property that makes a stolen laptop survivable: 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.
The full picture, including what it does not protect against → · Why this exists →
Why no app
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
What Watch Register does instead
A companion app to look up a single piece — serial, insurance, photos — would be a separate product with its own storage, and might happen later. It would not be a synced copy of this one. More in the FAQ →
Licensing
Watch Register is a proprietary desktop application for macOS and Windows, sold under a one-time personal licence. Not a subscription, and not a service that can be switched off out from under your records — because it does not depend on anything we run.
Use inside a dealership, auction house, or any other business requires a separate commercial licence. legal@watchregister.app.
Personal licence
Coming Fall 2026
Perpetual for the product generation you buy, including updates within it. Sold through a merchant of record, which handles sales tax and VAT and issues your licence key.
