Hi Everyone!! I've been collecting on and off since 1992. I have my coins inventoried in Bento which is a lite database software for the Mac. The way I was inventoring my coins I was basically adding them to the list as I purchased them but I'm thining there is probably a better way to organize them. I collect US coins as well as foreign coins so I was thinking about re-organizing the coins based on the country that they are from. Not necessarily the country that minted them. What do you all think? How do you all have your coins inventoried? I appreciate any ideas/suggestions!!! Thanks!!
I use Excel to inventory my coins. I typically have the dataset sorted by country and denomination. I include lots of stuff on every coin such as year, mintage, mint mark, variety, coinage metal, grade, quantity, purchase price, market price, lot value, bought from, purchased date, and other comments. The great thing about Excel is that you can create your own format, it's easy for most to use, and you can sort and query in seconds. In the same spreadsheet, I have tabs on American coins such as cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, proof sets, etc. so that I know which coins that I'm missing. I will list the year in the first column and have columns such as book 1, book2, ... and loose coins with a total on the far right. I will darken fields that aren't applicable to the years in the book. I also have a coin collector's program called Coin Assistant that I got as a gift. It is nice in that you can pick the coin out of a drop down menu and it fills in a lot of information such as mintage, coin metal, designer, etc. I also provides a coin value that seems to be way over valued. Thus, I use my Excel spreadsheet to quickly determine the value of my collection.
I'm a big Coin Manage fan. Got it last year and have never been disappointed. I see the new version is out so I will upgrade. I can easily create a spreadsheet, but I decided to go with a canned program. It's just designed for coin collecting. You can download a trial version for most of these programs and test them. Regardless of what you do, inventorying all your coins is a good idea for a multitude of reasons. One thing I have done is to insert a picture with the actual coin if it's worth $10 or more. Took me a long time to do that, but I like having the actual picture of the coin with the actual coin. There are so many different reports you can print.
