Overview

Every organization asks the same three questions daily: What do we have? Where is it? Who takes care of it? Getting Mango Inventory to answer them takes less than you’d think — half an hour of setup, one afternoon of capturing. This page is that path; every step links to the page with the details.

First: set up your organization

The app needs to know three things about your world. After that, every item has a place, a kind, and someone responsible.

1. Locations — buildings, rooms, shelves, cabinets. Start rough: a dozen rooms is plenty, nesting and detail grow later. → Assignment & locations

2. Categories and fields — “IT”, “Tools”, “Vehicles”: each category brings its own fields (serial number, warranty until, purchase price). Capture only what you actually want to evaluate — fields can be added any time. → Items

3. Team and responsibilities — invite your colleagues, pick a role per person, and name one responsible person who receives tickets and orders as long as nothing more specific applies. → SSO & users

The setup assistant walks exactly these three steps and suggests categories and locations matching your organization type. Larger institutions bring their users in automatically from Microsoft Entra or Google Workspace — directory sync.

Rather look around first?

“Explore with sample data first” fills your empty organization with a small example inventory — items, locations, tickets, orders. Everything is marked “Example” and one click removes it again; your own records stay.

Then: your first items — and the aha moment

Capturing. Three ways, from the most comfortable to the fastest:

• Walk the building with your phone. One photo per item; the AI suggests name and details while you move on. Everything lands as a personal draft, and you review it later at the computer — photo large, fields beside it, Enter publishes and jumps to the next capture. → Mobile app
• One by one at the computer: “New item”, pick a category, done. → Items
• From Excel. Already have a list? Then the import is the fastest way to a filled inventory. → Import & export

Many identical devices — 30 identical laptops — get described once as a model; every unit inherits the values and carries only its own serial number and location.

Assigning. Every item gets a home location, and whoever borrows it gets it assigned — person or room. From here on the app answers “Where is it?” and “Who has it?” by itself. → Assignment & locations

Labelling. The label connects the physical thing to its record. Two strategies, both good:

• Print QR labels from Mango — name, inventory number and QR code on standard Avery sheets. The label speaks for itself, even without a scan.
• Buy pre-printed numbered labels and scan each one once as you stick it on — nothing to print, more robust, and one roll lasts for years.

→ Barcodes & labels covers both routes in detail.

And then comes the moment all of this was for: scan the label — the item opens. With the mobile app, with a handheld scanner at the computer (from about CHF 30), or with the laptop camera. Checking out, reporting a defect, counting — it all starts with a scan. And someone without an account at all — a temporary helper, an external contractor, a visitor — can still report a defect through that same label: the ticket lands with the right person.

After that: everyday work

From here on, the inventory works for you:

• Tickets — report, assign and resolve defects
• Orders — request, fulfil and deliver materials
• Maintenance plans — recurring checks; the tickets appear automatically at the right time
• Stocktaking — verify your stock by scanning, room by room
• My tasks and notifications — what’s due today, without searching

And if you work with an AI assistant anyway: connect your AI lets ChatGPT or Claude read and maintain your inventory, and set up Copilot does the same for Microsoft 365.

Tip

Every page of this documentation sits in the navigation on the left, and the search at the top finds any section — try “create ticket”, for example. In the app, ⌘K (Windows: Ctrl+K) opens search across everything: items, people, tickets, orders and settings pages, plus recently viewed records and quick actions like “New item” or “Scan with camera”.