Settings

Settings is where the workspace is configured rather than used: what people can request, what models you hold, where spares live, which extra fields exist, what gets watched, and how the whole register is backed up.

For: Configure the workspace: request catalog, models, stockrooms, custom fields, automations, Home panels and backup.
Will not: Automation rules are only checked while Starkive is open; there is no background service, so anything a rule would have caught is announced next time you are in the app.
Writes: Changes settings, catalog, models, stockrooms, fields, rules and Home layout; every write lands in the append-only Activity Log, which is not edited or removed.

Finding your way around

Open Settings from the sidebar, or press ⌘, from anywhere. It is one list of rows in six groups.

This Mac: Appearance and Lock.
The register: Asset Tags, Custom Fields, Product Models, Sites, Stockrooms, and Departments & Locations.
Work: Alerts & Lifecycle, Automation, Automation Rules, Request Catalogue and Home Layout.
Organisation: Organisation, People and Protected Records.
Connected: iPhone App, Discover, Directory, Integrations, and API & MCP.
System: Activity Log, Backup, Get Help and About.

Lock asks for Touch ID or your password before the register opens. Its footer is plain about what that is: This stops somebody who picks up an unlocked Mac from reading the register. It is not encryption. FileVault protects the file at rest, and protected fields are encrypted only when they sync to Starkive Cloud.

Other parts of the app can send you straight to one of these. When they do, Settings opens on that row. This page covers the rows that shape the register and the work; Discover and Integrations have their own pages.

Automation Rules

A rule watches one thing the workspace can prove and announces it once. It is not a workflow engine, and the screen says so.

New Rule opens a sheet with four sections. Trigger is the event and, for events that use one, a day window. Then is a single toggle, Show a notification. Webhook takes an https URL and tells you what it detected, Slack, Teams or a generic JSON endpoint. Email to takes people from the directory, stored by id so the rule keeps reaching them if their address changes, plus a free-text field for addresses that are not in the directory.

Rules are checked while Starkive is open. There is no background service, so anything a rule would have caught is announced the next time you are in the app. The screen states this above the list rather than leaving you to discover it.

Check now evaluates immediately instead of waiting for the next sweep, which is the only way to know a rule you just wrote matches anything. It runs the same path the scheduled sweep runs, so testing a rule does not consume it. The result is reported in words: Nothing new to report. or Announced 3 items.

Under the rules, Recent activity lists the last twelve firings with an envelope or a bell to show whether each one was emailed, and when it fired.

Request Catalogue

What a user can ask for, and what happens when they ask. Everything active here appears in the request flow.

New Request Type opens an editor with three sections. Details is title, summary, category and an Active, appears in the request flow toggle. Fulfillment is what the request is fulfilled by, the SLA in days, and whether it requires approval. If it does, you can add Auto-approve under a cost with a threshold. Questions is the fields the requester fills in, each with a type and a required flag; a choice question takes its options comma-separated.

Deactivating a request type retires it without deleting its history. The row stays in the list, marked Inactive, and stops appearing in the request flow.

Question keys are derived from the question label and are stable across launches. Answers are stored against the key, so a key that changed between launches would leave saved answers unable to find their question. The editor fills in a key for you when you leave it blank.

Product Models

The normalised make and model library. Specs, useful life, warranty and end-of-life live here once, and assets reference them.

Seed from assets walks your existing register and creates a catalog entry for every distinct make and model it finds, so you do not type a fleet in by hand. It reports what it did: Added 14 models from your assets. or Catalog already covers your assets.

Each row shows the model, its category, useful life in months, warranty in months, end-of-life date where set, and a count of how many assets reference it. New Model takes manufacturer, model, category, SKU, useful life, warranty, end-of-life and end-of-support dates, and notes. Only manufacturer and model are required.

Stockrooms

The places spare and undeployed hardware lives: your office, a client site, a vault.

Each stockroom has a name, a kind, a location and notes, and an Active toggle. The row shows the kind, the location where set, and how many assets are currently in it.

Assets are put into a stockroom from the asset editor, or in bulk from the Assets list’s Move to Stockroom action, which lists the stockrooms defined here and can also take machines out of one. Deleting a stockroom detaches its assets rather than removing them.

Custom Fields

Extra things you record about assets and people beyond the built-in fields. One screen, with a switch between Assets and Users.

New Field opens a sheet with a name, a type, and, for a choice field, its choices one per line. The sheet reminds you: Don’t put anything private in a field’s name or choices. User fields can also take a Directory attribute, for example costCenter or extensionAttribute3. Leave it blank for manual entry.

An asset field has two more choices on the same sheet:

Where values are kept: Synced, encrypted or Keep off Starkive Cloud. Kept off, what you type stays on this Mac and your paired iPhone and is never sent to Starkive Cloud, so a device that syncs only through the cloud won’t see it. The field’s name and choices still sync. On a register that lives on this Mac, the sheet says the choice applies if it moves to Starkive Cloud. Switching a field back to synced warns first that values already typed will be encrypted and sent.
Offered on: tick the asset types the field belongs on. None ticked means every type. A value already recorded always shows, whatever the type.

Once a field holds values its type can’t change; add a new field of the type you want instead. The Active toggle retires a field, which hides it without touching stored values, and turns it back on. Remove… asks first: a removed field stops being offered on every device, what was recorded stays on those records, and it can’t be turned back on. Asset fields appear in their own Custom Fields section on each record, and as columns you can add to the Assets table.

The limits are the same on every plan and on the iPhone: 50 fields in use for assets and 50 for users (100 each counting retired ones), names up to 60 characters, up to 50 choices of 100 characters, and 500 characters in any one value. A write that would go over is refused with the asset and field named, rather than failing later at sync.

The line under the toolbar says where fields go. In Starkive Cloud, asset custom field values are encrypted on your device before they sync, so Starkive Cloud cannot read them. The fields themselves are not: their names, types and choices are readable by the server. Values on people do not sync at all. They stay on this Mac.

Fields from a template

Ready-made fields for each kind of asset. Offered, never forced.

Add from a Template sits beside New Field when Assets is selected. The sheet, Fields for laptops and desktops for example, lets you switch between the six kinds: laptops and desktops, phones and tablets (with IMEI), monitors, servers, network gear and printers. Tick the fields you want, rename any of them, and press Add 3 Fields. Each is offered only on that kind of asset, and afterwards it is an ordinary custom field. A field already in your register is marked Already added, and a field two templates share, like RAM, is widened to both kinds rather than added twice.

Phone number and Remote management address start set to Keep off Starkive Cloud. You can change that on the sheet.

The same offer appears where you need it. Add Asset shows a line such as Monitors often record Screen size (in), Resolution and Ports. with an Add Fields… button once you pick the type, and the record’s editor shows it in the Custom Fields section.

Home Layout

Which panels appear on the Home screen, and in what order. In an asset system the operator decides which numbers matter, so almost everything here can be turned off or moved.

Panels are grouped by where they sit: Main column, Side column and Bottom band. Each row has up and down controls and a visibility toggle. A panel only ever moves within its own column, so Home’s two-column composition survives any arrangement. Changes apply the next time Home opens.

Reset to default puts the layout back, and is disabled while the layout is already the default.

Below the fixed panels is Your charts: any widget you have built in Studio, offered as a Home panel with Add to Home. This is what makes the set of Home panels open-ended rather than the fixed list that ships. If you have no saved charts yet, the section says so and points you at Insights → Studio.

Backup

A backup is a single compressed file you save wherever you like, or keep in your own iCloud. Restore from it after a crash or on a new Mac.

Back Up Now… writes every workspace and all records to one .starkive file. Nothing is uploaded. The file is not encrypted, so keep it somewhere only you can reach.
Restore from Backup… replaces all current data and restarts the app to finish. It asks first, naming the backup’s date and version, and warns that it cannot be undone.
iCloud backup keeps a complete backup, every workspace, all records and your uploaded documents and photos, in your private iCloud, so you can restore on any Mac signed into the same account. It can run automatically on quit and daily, and Restore from iCloud… lists the snapshots with their dates and sizes.

A backup made by a newer version of Starkive Manifest will not restore into an older one. The app says so and tells you to update first, rather than failing halfway through replacing your data.

Export Evidence Pack… builds one .zip an auditor can open anywhere: the full inventory, the complete audit trail, IMAC history, the overdue-verification and unacknowledged-assignment worklists, and every sanitisation certificate on file, with a summary mapping each to its standard. It is a standard zip rather than the .starkive format, deliberately, so it opens on a machine that has never seen this app.

When a compliance profile has been captured, the pack also includes the compliance-depth registers: regulatory scope, encryption, acceptable-use attestation, fixed assets, disposal chain of custody, and, where there are any, the incident register and breach notification log.

Every pack also carries MISSING.txt at the top level: each piece of evidence the register still lacks, grouped by report, naming the asset, what it needs, the controls that need it and who can supply it. With a compliance profile the pack adds connection-review.csv, whether each device in service is approved to connect.

In Starkive Cloud, a certificate stored in the cloud but not yet on this Mac is downloaded before the pack is built. Any that still cannot be fetched are listed at the end of MISSING.txt instead of being left out quietly, and the README counts only what actually landed in the pack.

Activity Log

The append-only record of what changed in the workspace, and who changed it. It is the same trail the evidence pack exports.

Every write to the register lands here. The log is append-only by design: entries are not edited or removed, which is what makes it usable as evidence rather than as a convenience. Per-asset history is the same trail filtered to one machine, and is reachable from that asset’s record.

The evidence pack exports this in full as audit-trail.csv, alongside imac-history.csv for install, move, add and change events.