Getting help.

Yes. Everything the app stores on your computer is encrypted. Not hidden, not password-protected — encrypted. Without your passphrase it is unreadable to anyone, including us.

Most people picture a locked filing cabinet. That is the wrong picture, because a filing cabinet can be pried open and then someone reads your papers.

This is different. Your collection is stored as scrambled nonsense. Someone who takes your laptop, pulls the drive out and reads the raw file gets random characters. There is no lock to pick, because the information itself is scrambled.

Your passphrase is the only thing that unscrambles it.

You. That is the entire list.

Not us — there is no "us". No account, no server, no company holding a copy.

Not anyone on the internet. The app is built so it physically cannot make a network connection. Not "we promise not to" — the ability is switched off at the engine level.

Not someone using your unlocked laptop. The app locks itself, and locking throws away the key until you type your passphrase again.

Not Apple, not iCloud, not any backup service — unless you copy a file there yourself.

Whoever has it gets scrambled nonsense. Your watches, values, serial numbers, photos and documents are all inside the encrypted data, and it does not open without your passphrase.

This is the good case. Your computer is gone; your collection record is not exposed.

If you also lost your recovery key, your collection is gone. Permanently. Nobody can recover it — not you, not us, not anybody.

That sounds harsh, and it is the same fact that makes a stolen laptop survivable. Any back door that could let you back in could let someone else in too. So there isn't one. No email reset, no security questions, no support line.

It is a one-time code shown once during setup, and it is the only other thing that can open your register. It is never shown again.

Yes, write it down. On paper. Put it where your important documents live — a safe, a safe-deposit box, with your attorney. Not in a note on the same laptop.

Setup hides the key and asks you to type one block of it back before it will finish, so a key you meant to save but did not actually write down cannot slip past.

With the recovery key, a forgotten passphrase is a minor annoyance. Without either one, it is over.

Yes, whenever you like. Data → Change passphrase, at the top of the Security section.

It asks for your current passphrase first. That is deliberate: being unlocked is not proof that you are the owner — an unattended laptop is enough — and because nobody can reset a passphrase here, someone changing it while you were away would not merely read your register, they would close it permanently.

The change itself is instant. Your passphrase never encrypts your watches directly; it wraps the key that does. Changing it re-wraps that key and rewrites none of your data, so it takes the same moment whether you own three watches or three hundred.

Your recovery key is unaffected and keeps working. Your old passphrase stops working straight away.

It is worth acting on, and you will only be asked once.

The strength check runs when a passphrase is set. If yours was chosen in an older version, before that check existed, it was never measured — so the first time it is measured is on an ordinary unlock, which is when you may see the message.

We do not ask you to change your passphrase on a schedule, and we never will. Forced expiry pushes people towards small edits of the same password, and here it carries a real risk: there is no reset, so a change made under protest and then forgotten costs you the collection. We would rather tell you once, plainly, when a passphrase actually measures as weak, and leave the decision with you.

Being straight about the limits:

• Malware running on your computer while your register is unlocked. If something has taken over your machine while you are logged in, encryption at rest does not help.
• A passphrase written on a sticky note attached to the laptop.
• Someone watching you type it.
• You deleting your own data with no backup.

Encryption stops a file being read. It cannot stop the ordinary ways people lose things.

No, and you should not have to. You do not need to read a line of code to check it — open your computer's developer tools or a network monitor, use the app through a normal session, saving and exporting along the way, and watch the connection activity stay at zero the entire time. An app that asks you to take security on faith is not worth taking on faith, so we built the claim to be checkable at runtime, by anyone, in a few minutes.

Five things. Most owners use two or three of them:

• Insurance documentation
• Knowing whether you are up or down, honestly
• Estate planning
• Tracking the hunt — grails and watches you are chasing
• Simply knowing what you own

If a watch is stolen or lost, your insurer asks what you had, what it was worth, and what proof you have. Guessing after the fact is a bad position.

The app prints a scheduled property inventory — every watch, reference, serial number, market value and insured value — to hand to an insurer or attach to a claim. It flags anything worth more than it is insured for.

You can also attach the actual paperwork: invoices, warranty cards, appraisals, all encrypted alongside the record.

Yes, and it keeps two numbers apart on purpose:

UNREALIZED

what your collection might be worth today, based on values you typed in. An estimate. Not money.

REALIZED

what actually happened when you sold. Real money, worked out properly: sale price, minus selling fees, minus what you paid, duties, shipping and servicing.

The unglamorous part. If something happens to you, whoever handles your affairs needs to know what these watches are, what they are worth, which go to a named person and which can be sold.

The estate register prints exactly that, grouped by your instructions.

Yes. Mark a watch as "Seeking" and it sits in your register as part of the hunt — but it is excluded from every financial total and from both printed documents, because you do not own it.

When you buy it, enter the purchase price or date and the app converts it to Owned automatically.

Because everything it stores is encrypted, and that passphrase is the key. There is no "set this up later" — later would mean storing your collection unprotected in the meantime.

Use the "Generate a strong passphrase" button unless you have a reason not to. It gives you seven ordinary words — something along the lines of metal-digit-tape-singer-punch-panel-white. That is far harder to guess than the usual name-and-year with a symbol stuck on each end, and far easier to remember than a jumble of characters.

If you would rather type your own, the app scores it as you go and turns down the genuinely weak ones. Since nobody can reset it for you, that check is the only chance to catch a poor choice before it matters.

Yes. Either bring your own sheet or start from the template.

Data → Download spreadsheet template gives you an .xlsx with the fourteen columns it reads and one example row to replace. Every column is formatted as text, so a reference or serial number beginning with a zero keeps it. Leave the header row as it is; blank cells are fine, and only Brand or Model is required.

Data → Import a spreadsheet reads .xlsx and .csv alike — there is no need to convert anything. Before a single row is added it shows you every column in your file, which field it will go into, and any column it did not recognise. Check that, then import. Nothing is replaced; rows are always added.

One caution if you are using .csv rather than the template: spreadsheet programs drop a leading zero from a number as you type it, so a reference of 0123 becomes 123 in your file before this app ever sees it. Use the .xlsx template and that cannot happen.

No. Maker and model are enough to save a watch. Everything else can be added whenever you get to it.

The fields that matter most for insurance are serial number, market value and scheduled (insured) value.

They answer three different questions, and a watch can be all three at once:

STARS (1-5)

how much do I love this?

GRAIL

is this one of the ones I chased?

LEDGER RATING

what do I intend to do with it: Hold, Buy, Sell, Watch?

Why they are separate: a watch that has appreciated past what you would pay today can be five stars, a grail, and marked Sell all at the same time. One combined field could not say that.

Grail is one you are evaluating, or one you chased and landed.

Holy grail is the unattainable one — the someday watch.

A watch you do not own yet, but are hunting or evaluating.

It shows in your register with a SEEKING tag, but never appears in a money total, an insurance schedule or an estate register. It is a placeholder for the hunt, not an asset.

Ledger rating "Sell" is an intention. You still own it.

Status "Sold" is a fact. It is gone, it leaves your held totals, and it moves into your realized profit and loss.

On purpose, and it tells you when it happens.

Enter a sale date or price and it marks the watch Sold. Enter loss details and it marks it Lost. Enter purchase details on a Seeking watch and it marks it Owned.

Without this, a watch you had clearly sold would still be counted in your market value, cost basis and insurance coverage — making every total wrong with nothing on screen to warn you.

Because it is the real one. It subtracts selling fees, duties and shipping you paid on the way in, and any servicing you logged while you owned it.

Worked example: a watch bought for $4,000, serviced twice for $1,950, sold for $6,500 with $780 in fees looks like a $1,570 win. It is actually a $380 loss. The disposition report shows both figures side by side.

Its market value is higher than what your policy would pay out. The gap is what you would have to absorb yourself.

Yes, but you have to tell it. Set the Insurer and "Pays up to" fields under Valuation & coverage.

Some specialist policies pay above the scheduled value — 150% is a common figure. Without that setting, the app assumes you are covered only for the scheduled figure and will warn you about gaps that do not exist.

It cuts the other way too. A standard homeowner's policy usually caps a single watch far below its value unless individually scheduled. Record that honestly and the app will tell you the truth.

Set its status to Lost and fill in the Loss & claim section: the type of loss, the date, police report number, claim number, and what the insurer actually paid you.

The settlement is treated as proceeds, exactly like a sale price, so the claim appears properly in your realized profit and loss. The disposition report labels it as an insurance claim rather than a sale.

PHOTOS are wrist shots and reference images. They are automatically shrunk so a page of twenty watches does not choke. Click any photo to see it full size, with a "Save full size" button.

DOCUMENTS are evidence — invoices, warranty cards, appraisals. Images or PDFs, stored exactly as you gave them, never compressed, because the fine print matters. They appear as a list on the watch's detail panel; click one to save the original file.

Use Documents for anything you might have to show an insurer.

Two steps:

1. Docs → Insurance schedule. This saves a file to your Downloads folder. That is the document itself, not a PDF yet.
2. Open that file — it opens in your browser — press Cmd-P, and choose "Save as PDF" from the PDF menu at the bottom-left.

The app explains this on screen when you save the document.

Doing that would mean granting the app permission to write files anywhere on your computer and to launch other programs on your behalf. That is a real increase in what the app can reach, in exchange for saving you one click. It was not worth it.

No. Your collection lives on this machine only. Moving it to another computer means exporting an encrypted vault file and taking it there yourself.

This is by design. Sync requires either:

1. A server holding the master copy (which we reject — our product is that nothing of yours sits on somebody else's server), or
2. Resolved changes across devices (which breaks the air-gap, requires a server for conflict resolution).

So we chose: no sync, which means you own the only copy, encrypted and offline. The trade is you cannot access from multiple devices without moving files around. Most collectors do that once or twice a year, not constantly.

No. Market values are what you type in. A price feed would require a network connection, and this app does not make network connections.

Really. See "What if I forget my passphrase?" above. It is a deliberate feature, not a missing one.

No. The app produces an accurate record of what you paid and what you got back. What that means for your taxes is a conversation with your accountant — collectibles are often treated differently from other assets.

Watch Register is deliberately desktop-only, for reasons built into the product, not limitations we're working around.

A watch collection is something you review occasionally — a few times a year — to check provenance, look up documentation, confirm insurance coverage, or plan for sale or inheritance. That use case is not "check my phone constantly" — it's "sit down at my computer for an hour and manage the details."

A mobile app designed for that would be a different product: frequent access, summaries instead of full records, cloud sync so you can check one watch detail from anywhere.

The privacy trade-off makes sense for this product *because* you are sitting at your machine. It does not make sense for a mobile app, because mobile sync requires one of:

• A server holding your master copy (breaks our core promise)
• Cloud sync with conflict resolution (breaks the air-gap)
• Local-only mode on each device (defeats the point of mobile)

If we built a mobile app under the same security model, it would be separate data silos: phone has this version, computer has that version, no way to reconcile without leaving the device or trusting a server.

A proper mobile experience requires compromising on the architecture. Rather than do that, we are building this as a desktop application that does one thing properly: manage a complete, secure, offline register of a physical collection.

If you want a mobile app to look up a specific watch (serial, insurance, photos), that is a different product category and may happen later — but it would be separate, with its own storage and sync, not a mobile version of Watch Register.

Stop. Do not create a new passphrase — that starts a fresh empty register.

Your register lives in the application's own data folder, not inside the app itself, so moving the app or reinstalling it does not remove your collection. If you are being asked to set a new passphrase, the app is not finding that folder — most often because you are signed in to a different user account on the computer, or because a restore or a migration to a new machine skipped it.

Check you are in the same user account you set it up in. If you have an encrypted vault backup, you can open that instead — see the backup question in this section.

Your data has not been deleted. The app is not finding it.

On the lock screen, choose "Use recovery key instead" and enter the recovery key from setup. Capitals, spaces and dashes do not matter.

Once you are in, change your passphrase to something memorable (Data → Change passphrase). Your recovery key keeps working.

If you have neither, see "What if I forget my passphrase?" above. There is genuinely nothing that can be done.

Data → Save encrypted vault. That produces a single encrypted file holding everything: watches, photos, documents, owner details.

Keep it somewhere other than this laptop. It is encrypted, so a USB stick or a cloud drive is fine — without the passphrase it is unreadable to whoever holds it.

Two things worth doing:

• Store the vault file and your recovery key in different places. Together in one folder means a single loss takes both.
• Back up again after any significant change. The last backup is the only one that counts.

No, and it only happens once. An earlier version stored full-size camera images, which made the app slow. It is shrinking them for display. Files you attached under Documents are untouched.

Watch Register is published by Aveneg Technologies, LLC.

It was built for collectors who could not find anything that handled provenance, insurance schedules and estate records properly, which is why it does the unglamorous things well and none of the flashy things at all.

For bugs, questions or suggestions, email support@watchregister.app.

For anything commercial, see the next question.

Watch Register is commercially licensed software: a paid licence per user, covering personal use for tracking your own collection.

Using it inside a dealership or auction house, bundling it with a product or service, or anything at volume beyond individual use, is a separate conversation. Email legal@watchregister.app and say what you have in mind.