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Activity Log
Gubbins keeps a chronological ledger of every change to your inventory — what happened, to what, and when. It's your audit trail and your undo-history-of-record.
Where to find it: the Activity screen (a global feed), and the Activity tab on any individual item.
The Activity screen has two views, chosen with the Items / Locations switch above the list: what happened to the things you own, and what happened to the places you keep them in. Each has its own filters and its own Export.
Just about every meaningful change is logged: creating and editing items, stock adjustments, moves and transfers, loans out and returns, sales and write-offs, cycle-count reconciliations, revaluations, servicing, and more.
Every entry is also recorded against who made it. On a single-person setup that's always the built-in Admin account, so it isn't something you need to think about — and Gubbins doesn't clutter the list saying so. Turn on accounts and each entry shows the name of the person who made the change, under the time it happened. Deleting an account never rewrites its entries as somebody else's work: they move to the built-in System account, and that is what the log then names.
An exported log always names the account, whether or not you use accounts, because the file is read away from Gubbins by someone who may not know how many people had access. So does the cold-storage copy storage triage writes before pruning old history.
- The global Activity feed shows everything across your inventory, newest first.
- Each item's Activity tab shows just that item's history — a complete story of one thing.
Editing an item's details is recorded too, as a single Details changed entry — and it shows the value before and the value after, one line per field, so the entry answers “what was this item's cost in March?” and not merely “something about the cost moved”:
Details changed
Unit cost £4.00 → £5.50
Barcode Not set → 5012345678900
Each value is shown the way you entered it: a price in your currency, a date in your usual format, a category by name, a weight or a measurement in your chosen units. A field that was empty reads Not set rather than leaving a gap, so clearing a value is as clear as changing one.
The fields recorded are its price (unit cost, purchase price, cost per unit of measure or current value), barcode, serial number, manufacturer and manufacturer part number, category, batch and lot numbers, reorder thresholds, expiry, acquisition and warranty dates, depreciation period, weight and dimensions — alongside the renames, tracking-mode switches and condition changes that have always been logged.
A sync can change an item's details too, without anybody editing it. When two devices edited the same item while apart, the more recent change wins and the other is set aside — and an Overwritten by sync entry records it the same way, naming each field the merge replaced and showing the value it discarded beside the one it adopted. So the log never reads as though a discarded edit still stands, and the version that lost is not lost with it.
ℹ️ Note A few things change quietly. The free-text description, notes and operational parameters do, because keeping a copy of long text on every edit would bloat a log that syncs to your other devices — as do custom-field values. So do the favourite pin and the dead-stock and unlimited-supply toggles, which are display and reporting preferences rather than changes to what the item is. Saving a form without actually changing anything records nothing at all.
Locations keep a record too, separate from the items inside them. There are two ways to read it:
- the Locations view on the Activity screen, which shows every location's record together, newest first — including places that have since been deleted;
- the History tab in a single location's Edit dialog, for just that one place.
It covers the changes that reshape where things live — the ones that are hardest to explain after the fact:
- the location being created;
- a rename, showing the name before and after;
- a move under a different parent (or out to the top level), naming both;
- archiving and restoring it;
- deleting it, noting how many items went to Unassigned and how many sub-locations were moved up — and the sub-locations themselves each record the move, so a shelf that ends up somewhere new because the room above it was deleted says so.
Everything else about a location — its colour, icon, capacity, dimensions, walk order, the default flag and the dead-stock setting — describes the place rather than the shape of your storage, so it isn't recorded. Nor is a save that didn't actually change anything.
ℹ️ Note Deleting a location doesn't erase its record. The entries are kept with the name the place had, so a deletion still travels to your other devices and still appears in a backup. Because there is no longer a location to open, those entries are read from the Locations view on the Activity screen — that's where to look to answer "what happened to the top shelf?" after the shelf is gone.
Names in the Locations view are shown as plain text rather than links, and are the name the place carried at the time — a record of what happened, not a route to somewhere that may since have been renamed or removed.
💡 Tip The Activity log is the fastest way to answer "what changed, and when did that happen?" — if a count looks wrong, its item's history usually shows exactly what led to it. For "why is this shelf suddenly under a different room?", switch the Activity screen to Locations, or open that location's own History tab.
ℹ️ Note The log can grow large over time. If you need to reclaim space, old history can be pruned (with a cold-storage export first) from the storage triage tools — nothing is lost without a copy.
Export saves a log as a spreadsheet or a table — handy for an audit trail, a handover, or working out where a month's stock went. It sits on the Activity screen (exporting whichever of Items or Locations you are looking at), and above an item's own Activity tab for just that item.
Either way the file covers the whole log under whatever you have filtered it to — not just what is on screen. An items file carries the timestamp, the item, the kind and action, the detail and the quantity and value changes; a locations file carries the timestamp, the location, the action and the detail. Both then name who made each change, as a display name and the account's own identifier — the identifier is there because a display name can be changed afterwards, and two people can share one. The usual formats are offered: CSV, TSV, an Excel workbook, JSON, Markdown, printable HTML or plain text. See Export & import.
Clear log, above an item's Activity tab, empties that item's history. It is not a hard delete of everything: one entry is left in place recording that the log was cleared, when, and by whom — the signed-in person if you use accounts, or a short marker for the device it was done on if you don't.
The item itself is untouched. Its stock, photos, custom fields and everything else stay exactly as they were; only the record of how it got there goes.
Reports that read the log adjust accordingly. Dead-stock detection counts an item's idle time from its last recorded movement, so once that record is gone it counts from the clear instead — the item starts fresh rather than being reported as idle since the day you added it. Stock aging does the same, except that an item's Acquired date, which the clear doesn't touch, still takes precedence if you recorded one.
⚠️ Heads-up Clearing cannot be undone, and it travels: your other devices drop the same entries on their next sync. Take an Export first if there is any chance you will want the history later. If you only want to reclaim space, prune old history from the storage triage tools instead — that keeps a cold-storage copy.
ℹ️ Note Clearing is only offered to someone allowed to delete audit records. With accounts switched off that's everyone, as usual; with them on, a role without that permission sees the log and its Export button but no Clear.
- Alerts — things that need action now.
- Export & import — saving the log to a file.
- Upcoming agenda — things due soon.
- Storage triage — managing history size.
- Locations & stock — the hierarchy a location's own history records.