Lost & Found

Somebody found a phone in a meeting room. Somebody else reported a phone missing three days ago. Lost & Found is the record of both, and the workflow that turns “we have an unclaimed phone” and “I lost my phone” into the same phone. The screen holds two registers, reached by tabs: Lost reports and Found property. A lost report is somebody telling you something of theirs is missing. A found property entry is an item that physically exists in your possession right now. They are different things with different lifecycles — an item can be found with no report ever filed against it, and a report can sit open with nothing found to match — which is why they are tracked separately rather than as one status field.

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Lost reports

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Found property

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Matching a found item to a lost report

Rather than making you eyeball two lists and guess, the matching screen suggests candidates for you. Open a found item and it surfaces open lost reports that plausibly describe it, each scored by how closely it matches — category, description, location, date — with the closest candidates first. You confirm a match; the system does not commit one on its own. Confirming a match moves the lost report to Matched and the found item to Claimed. Nothing is released yet — matching says “this is probably it,” release says “and now it’s gone.”

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Releasing and disposing

Release is how a Claimed item leaves the store. It records who collected it — a named collector, not just a tick box — and when. That name is your evidence if someone comes back later asking where their property went. Dispose is for items nobody ever claimed. Each property category — phones, wallets, umbrellas, and so on — carries its own default holding period, configured per organisation, so a phone might sit in store for weeks while an umbrella clears out in days. Disposal is not available until that period has passed, and it always asks for a reason: donated, destroyed, sold, handed to police, kept, or returned to the finder.

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Adding a report or item

Each register has its own New button — New lost report on the Lost reports tab, New found item on the Found property tab. Found items also get a shortcut into the global header: + Create → Found item logs one from anywhere in the app, without navigating to the Lost & Found screen first — useful for the person at the front desk who has just been handed a set of keys and wants to log them before they get busy.