Getting started

Welcome to Kalta. This guide walks you through the first five minutes with the app — enough to go from install to your first tracked item.

What you need

• An iPhone running iOS 16 or later.
• An Apple ID (the same one you use for iCloud and the App Store is fine).
• Kalta installed from the App Store.

That’s it — there are no other accounts to create. Kalta uses Sign in with Apple as the only sign-in method, so you don’t need to think up a new password.

1. Sign in with Apple

Launch Kalta. You’ll see the welcome screen with a single Sign in with Apple button.

Tap it. iOS handles the authentication — you’ll see Apple’s standard dialog asking whether to share your email and name.

• Email: you can share your real email, or choose Apple’s private relay (...@privaterelay.appleid.com) which forwards messages to your real inbox without revealing it.
• Name: Kalta only uses this as your display name visible to people you share warehouses with. You can pick any name — it doesn’t have to match your Apple ID.

After you confirm, you land on the empty warehouses list.

2. Create your first warehouse

A warehouse in Kalta is a container for boxes. Most people start with a single warehouse for their whole home; you might add more later if you store supplies in separate locations (e.g., “Basement”, “Car trunk”, “Cabin”).

Tap the + button at the bottom right.

Give your warehouse a name — something concrete like “Home pantry” or “Basement supplies”. Tap Create.

You’re now inside the warehouse. It has four tabs at the bottom: Boxes, Items, Scan, and Settings. Right now they’re all empty.

3. Create your first box

A box is a physical container — a plastic tub, a cardboard box, a drawer, a shelf section. Anything that holds things you want to track.

In the warehouse, tap the + button (bottom right, again).

Give the box a name — “Canned food”, “First aid”, “Batteries”. Tap Create.

Kalta generates a unique QR code label for this box. You’ll see a preview of it on screen.

You can:

• Print it now if you have a supported Bluetooth label printer (see Printing).
• Share it as an image via the iOS share sheet — send to your Mac, print on a regular inkjet, tape to the box.
• Skip printing and come back later — the QR is always available from the box detail screen.

Stick the label on the physical box. This is what makes Kalta feel magical later: you can scan any box’s label to jump straight to its contents.

4. Add your first item

From the box detail screen, tap Add items.

You get two options:

• Scan barcode — uses the camera to read product barcodes (EAN-13 most commonly). Kalta looks the product up in a public database and pre-fills the product name, category, and sometimes a photo.
• Manual entry — for things with no barcode, or for products not in the database (more common for private-label store brands).

Scan your first product:

After a successful scan, Kalta fills in the product fields. All you need to add yourself:

• Quantity — how many of this thing you put in the box.
• Expiration date — check the packaging. Tap the date field to pick.
• Notes (optional) — anything useful, like “rotated from pantry 2026-04”.

Tap Save. The item appears in the box.

5. That’s it — you have a working inventory

From here:

• Scan more items to fill the box.
• Create more boxes for other categories.
• Check the main dashboard — boxes and items are sorted by expiry urgency. The most critical stuff is at the top.
• Enable notifications in Settings to get reminders before items expire.

For the full picture of what else Kalta can do, read through the rest of the docs.

What’s next

Most people’s next step is understanding how warehouses, boxes, and items fit together — including when to create multiple warehouses and how to share them with your family. That’s covered in Warehouses, boxes & items.

If you want to set up the AI feature that identifies unknown products from photos, jump straight to Scanning and AI.