OK, so months after my silver purchases, I am trying to get up the energy to do a full spreadsheet inventory of my small collection. It might seem like overkill, but I tend to be a perfectionist (who also procrastinates ). What sort of categories would you include? I'm going to list date, description, silver content, troy ounces, price paid, maybe current value. I'm hoping to get this project done so I can separate the silver from the little mint boxes (I'll label them to match back up later) into a hiding place that we can easily grab if necessary. Any input would be appreciated. Methods you use, ideas, how you keep your coins organized. Also, on a side note, do any of you guys feel comfortable using Numista.com to keep tabs on your collection? It's tempting, but I am not sure if it's secure if I don't use VPNs (not totally sure how and if it would work).
Just jump right in and start building it. After a couple rows you'll know what you want. Nice thing is you can insert and rearrange columns as you go. Keep in mind potential sort criteria: chronological, numeric, consistent nomenclature. Whatever you are interested in having at your fingertips: purchase date, cost, date, denomination, variety, current value (although that requires periodic maintenance), location, grade, type of packaging... I pretty much use two spreadsheets, one for inventory and one for gains/losses, keeping the printouts one page wide.
I am now using CollecOnline, and find it terrific- light years beyond CollectiveCoin. It has fields where you can enter all your accounting statistics, and just about any other information imaginable about a coin. Public information and private information are kept separately- nobody can see your private data. I haven't used the feature yet, but it can generate PDFs of your collection and do all kinds of stuff. It is a French site but is very easily navigable to an English speaker. They're not paying me for this testimonial. I just tried the site out and was quite impressed with it, so much so that I actually upgraded to the middle ("Classic") paid membership level. (There is a free tier as well, however.) The owner has spent the last eight years building it.
Like I said to my friend that is also a fan of the movie Days of Thunder: "There's nothing I can't do with a spreadsheet!" It's been a while since retiring that I used graphing features in excel. But as I recall if you block a field and select graph features or icons from the command line the software offers selections of different types of graphs. Again just jump in and play with it, hit the F1 key, but don't forget to save periodically so can resume play if the ogre gets you. You really want to have some fun link your photo file locations to your spreadsheet entries!
Definitely record the date purchased and cost. That will make paying taxes a lot easier down the road. I like Excel for inventory lists as well.
