Private · Encrypted · Offline by design
Watch Register is private desktop software for cataloguing a watch collection — 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
In plain terms
Watch Register is desktop software for cataloguing and tracking a watch collection — an encrypted inventory, appraisal and service-history app for macOS and Windows. It records what you own, what you paid, what it is worth now, who has serviced it and who inherits it, and keeps all of it on your own computer. It is the replacement for the spreadsheet most collectors outgrow, without becoming another cloud account holding a list of your valuables.
Three watches or three hundred. Some collectors need an insurance schedule and an estate register; others simply want to stop losing receipts and forgetting what a piece cost. The same record serves both, and the one you start early is the one that still works later — starting out, a growing collection, buying and selling, or a significant collection.
A spreadsheet holds the data but produces nothing: no insurance schedule, no estate register, no service reminders, no attached appraisals, and no encryption worth the name. A cloud app produces those things but requires uploading photographs, serial numbers and valuations to a company you have never met. Watch Register produces the documents without the upload.
A scheduled property inventory for insurance — every piece, reference, serial number, appraised and insured value, with anything underinsured flagged. An estate register for an executor, grouped by your instructions. Both print, and both stay on your machine until you hand them over.
A native desktop application for macOS 11 or later and Windows 10 and 11. It installs like any other program, needs no account, and works identically on a computer that has never been connected to the internet. There is no phone app, and that is deliberate.
A one-time personal licence, perpetual for the product generation you buy and including updates within it. Nothing recurring, no account to maintain, and nothing that stops working if the company does — because the software does not depend on anything we run.
Who it’s for
Nearly every collection starts with two or three watches and a spreadsheet that has already become annoying. It ends up somewhere none of us planned. Most collectors are more than one of the following at once and move between them over years — so these are stages, not categories, and the record you start at the first is the one that still works at the last.
You have a handful of pieces and a spreadsheet, or nothing at all. What matters now is starting a record you will not have to rebuild later — and learning what a service costs before it surprises you.
The collection has outgrown memory. Some pieces are worth insuring and some are not, you are tracking what you want as well as what you own, and you need to know which is which without opening five files.
You sell as well as buy. That means cost basis, duties, shipping, servicing and commission — and a realized figure that is honest rather than the one that flatters you.
Enough value that an underwriter, an executor or an appraiser will eventually read your records. Provenance, scheduled values and an estate register stop being optional.
Two things that apply at every size — and one that does not
Your data stays on your own machine, encrypted, whether you have five watches or five hundred: there is no account, no upload, and no company holding a copy. The price is the same at every size — $99 once, not a subscription. The exception is commercial use: a dealership, auction house or anyone holding inventory to sell needs a separate licence, which is a conversation rather than a checkout — legal@watchregister.app.
Privacy and 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.
What the software does
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 — figures from a real transaction
A dive chronograph, bought at auction for $2,810, plus $80 in duties and shipping — a cost basis of $2,890. One service call for $615 brings total invested to $3,505. Today’s market value is $7,500Provenance. Compare only to the purchase price and the gain looks like $4,690. The real number — measured against everything actually spent keeping the watch running — is $3,995.
Security and encryption
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 there is no phone 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 →
Pricing and 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.