How Do You Catalogue Your Collection?

Curious how others catalogue their collections? I use numbered stock books and an excel spreadsheet (lots of tabs!)

I'm thinking there must be a better way…

How do you organize your collections?

I don't. Life's too short.

I use Excel spreadsheets for each country broken down by type (definitive, commemorative, back-of-book, etc.) with a tab for each major series (Columbians, National Parks, etc.) or time span (1940-1949 for example). Within each tab, I track Scott number, denomination, description, catalogue value, what I paid for it, condition, date purchased, and notes about the source of the stamp or anything specific about the stamp itself.

I save invoices. Nothing else.

I save invoices also. I have spreadsheets to track what I have in my numeral cancellations collections.

Overall I have a pretty small collection, so I don't know how worldwide collectors track what they have. Maybe online catalogues?

I'm a world wide collector & struggled with how to keep track of my collection for years. I finally switched to a computer program that includes every country past and present, all of Scott information pre loaded, a thumbnail of nearly every stamp included that you can easily replace with a pic of yours, inventory spaces for four levels of quality for MH MNH used, value for each (developer claims it is street value), multiple quantity, keeps track of purchase sale profit loss if you want to get that involved, search and sort, and much more than a collector needs. Dumb and simple to use. Type in a number and your inventory will pop up. It has a slide show feature to view your stamps but it's clunky to me. Now I not only know what stamps I have but a basic idea of value but always keeping in mind that no matter what the book says just try to find someone who wants to buy it. Lol. It's updated every year with all the new stamps. It's made my collection more enjoyable.

I use StampManage software to keep track of my worldwide material.

Rather than keep track of what I have, I list what I am missing. That way when I go to stamp shows I don't end up purchasing stamps I already have.

Dianne

I put better stock stamps with tabs with Scott's number and catalog value. The rest I do nothing. I guess I really need to but like others have said life is to short.

I have no clue to what I have . Trying to keep track would only slow me down .

Have a few goals and trying to reach them but it is sort of a self imposed egocentric goal .

I use excel w/o complexity. Single tab per country. Of course, I have to record cat # (sometimes two for for foreign countries), issue date, etc. for all the stamps, but then I have an automatic shopping list

I use the Scott Big Blue spreadsheet for items in that Album. For US I use software whose mention is banned here. For all, I circle the item in a Scott Catalog, a mini with checklist for US, and a ~1970 Scott Catalog for worldwide. So some have both software and hard copy.

Don't know if your topic included covers, but for my Hawaii Covers, I utilize a website called Catalogit Hub to digitize my collection. This website is primarily designed for museums and historical societies, but allows for personal collections as well. For anyone who may have any interest in Hawaii's history you can view my cover collection and other "stuff". Go to the site and search under "Hawaii's history".

I'm interested only on what I'm missing on my main collecting areas and interests. Life, is too short to count everything!

I use Excel. One tab per country. For each stamp, I write down the issue date, the S.C. number, the catalog value, and the Stamp World value.

Worldwide collector here:
I keep it as simple as possible. I use a Word .doc of simple Scott numbers. Basically just a checklist. I made a master document with numbers going up to 3000, then I can just copy and paste what I need, for each country, and save under that country name. No extraneous information, just numbers. This, mostly, serves me when I go to shows and I want to work on a certain country I can just save a .pdf copy of the file on my phone.