Looking for recommendations for collection software or app
BAYOUBENGAL
Posts: 97 ✭✭✭
As the title says, any recommendations for software and or an app to track my collection. Love PCGS but have NGC, raw etc. Thanks for any help.
BAYOUBENGAL
CFA, LSU AND ANA
CFA, LSU AND ANA
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I made my own spreadsheet in Excel with internal links to the photos. Free to me and infinitely customizable.
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Thomas Jefferson
My digital cameo album 1950-64 Cameos - take a look!
https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/1000474/coin-collecting-software-what-are-you-using-for-your-coin-collection/
Where do you save the photos? I. Excellent or a different place?
I am a retired engineer so I'll give you the standard engineering answer. It depends.
Many of my photos are on my hard drive, many are in the cloud on OneDrive. Many are True Views but I tend to access my personal copy even thought it is easy enough to be linked to the PCGS copy.
I do not feel the need to have access to all images remotely. If I did, I would put them all on OneDrive.
To link a photo to a line item on my spreadsheet, I select a cell (where the link will be shown) and then click on the Insert heading a the top, select Link, insert Link, and follow the pop up window.
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Thomas Jefferson
My digital cameo album 1950-64 Cameos - take a look!
I use excel also, works great.
Keep your spreadsheet on a removable thumb drive and keep a separate folder(s) of pix on the same thumb drive. Shortcuts on your desktop will take you to them when the drive is plugged in. Saving them on your hard drive is fine. . . until your computer hard drive crashes.
Save your pix in thumb drive folders after editing with your favorite software.
The government is incapable of ever managing the economy. That is why communism collapsed. It is now socialism’s turn - Martin Armstrong
I use CoinManage i love it
Back around 2008 I purchased a coin inventory software... Intending to enter all my coins and become 'organized'....
For some reason, I thought I would have a lot of spare time once I retired. 
Now I wonder how I had time to work....I have never used the software, not even sure where it is...Oh well... I had good intentions. Cheers, RickO
I used to use the collection management software that Numismatic News publishers offered called Numismaster.
I and many others spent hundreds of hours creating our databases. When the company went into bankruptcy, they just put up an error message and abandoned all their users. They never offered a way to migrate the data to another software product.
Shameful.
https://collectivecoin.com/
Crazy solid, crazy underutilized.
"It's like God, Family, Country, except Sticker, Plastic, Coin."
Coin Manage is very good and I use it, but at least one of their series is not quite correct - but the vast majority are correct. I have a few of my entries corrupted and then it's a pain. Overall - I would recommend it, however. I am currently combining some of the information I have in Coin Manage, PCGS and NGC registries into excel - but that is not the end product I would like ether.
So I am creating the excel spreadsheet for tracking and incorporating aspect from all three into a single page for each coin with all of the information on it that you'd ever want and making a album/catalog for the collection. If I upgrade a coin - I'll just replace the page. This is an extremely time consuming and comprehensive solution, however. It will be very nice and extremely informative when I gift the collection.
For years I had one employee who was fast and accurate with the coin inventory.
We had date of purchases, , pictures, Descriptions, costs, and locations for each coin. The biggest problem was when I sold a coin she needed to update the excel file to remove a coin as well move it from it's location. The same was true when coin was moved to another location. I din't want silver or platinum coins mixed in with the golds. The total number of oz in the coins by date order and the coins by location had to agree.
Now, alas, she has far more difficulty doing the job. Too much time, too many mistakes. I had my daughter look at the excel and she showed me how we only needed 1 spreadsheet not two.
I was going to get rid of the employee but after 45 years I'm used to her. Besides, she still does many things I can't do so I
m not seriously considering parting.
Besides she knows where all the coins are "buried" and my daughter (since it's her mother ) would kill me.
So...after 45 years she's still a keeper.
I have an excel "sheet" for inventory and one for current year sales. Each coin gets an inventory line item at purchase with colunms for all the information I need to show my costs including cost to complete the future sale. Current value has little meaning and requires constant updating, I don't include it. My inventory does provide me with a total cost of all my coins. What does matter is initial cost (basis) and anything that increases the basis, i.e shipping, grading, selling fees, etc.
When an inventory line item sells, complete the inventory columns and then cut and past over on the current year sales sheet. For this reason both sheets will require identical columns. At tax time use the sales sheet for everything you need to claim/report to IRS.
A knowledge of excel formulas will keep your mathematics automatically updated.
The government is incapable of ever managing the economy. That is why communism collapsed. It is now socialism’s turn - Martin Armstrong
I have not tried it yet but there is an open source coin inventory app available for free. Works with Windows, Mac, and Linux.
http://opennumismat.github.io/open-numismat/
I may give it a whirl soon. Looks like it’s more up to date than many I’ve seen.
TurtleCat Gold Dollars
I've used coin manage for a few yrs now. It's a pretty decent program, but every year I have to manually enter most all the new coins. Besides that, it does work great. I liked using excel when I had it, but I bought a new Win10 desktop about 3 yrs ago and it only came with WPS office. That has glitches in it when you add rows you lose picture destinations or have merged cells and it won't let you sort. Microsoft Office is just too much money anymore. I plan on just using coin manage and doing my own manual additions. No need to pay for an upgrade.
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Best to avoid links to pictures in excel. Works better when every coin has it's own unique "serial number." For raw coins I assign a serial number that physically stays with the coin and is shown in the excel inventory line item. My pics are in folders such as slabbed gold, other slabs, raw gold etc. They are filed by the assigned serial number or the last five digits of the TPG cert number. I can pick any line item in my excel inventory and easily find the associated picture in my pictures folders.
Excel gives you the flexibility to enter, save and track only the data that you need. Only time it needs an update is when you buy and when you sell an item. Your unique design can provide you all the data you need at tax preparation time. As I stated earlier, it is a waste of time and takes a lot of effort to keep it up to date with "current value" since that data is constantly changing.
The government is incapable of ever managing the economy. That is why communism collapsed. It is now socialism’s turn - Martin Armstrong
Thanks @DelawareDoons I never heard of this software and it looks pretty nice to save your collection and manage everything online.
It also looks like it hasn’t had many (any?) updates in 3-5 years like most of the projects out there. The open source one I linked to was updated just a few months ago.
TurtleCat Gold Dollars