Fellow collectors,
I'm just going through the relatively tedious annual task of stock-taking and database update on my
collection. I'm a pretty disorganised chappie, and one can hardly imagine how untidy it all gets. So far I've discovered 5 coins that were not in any of my records (all, one way or another, retail buys not involving the major sites), and 1 coin that is in my records but is missing. I eventually traced the one missing piece to having bought it, but not having collected it from the dealer, a dealer whose full name I cannot recollect, and who does not have an internet presence or any contact details. By a stroke of luck, I bumped into him at a coin
fair on Saturday, so it's going to get sorted out. Other tasks in my annual book-keeping include weighing coins for weight-unknown pieces, updating information on provenances so far as possible (hence yesterday's lucky find of three coins in a single 1933 FPL), removing entries for now-duplicate-coins to a separate spreadsheet of items to dispose of, updating my entire spreadsheet with RBW numbers, which are now my second subsidiary
catalogue references apart from
Sydenham and
Crawford, marking in green bold
types those RBW numbers where the actual coin is mine, and once I've got the spreadsheet and references in a half-way decent state (some tasks will carry over for a later time) actually doing the physical reconciliation with what's in the trays (a task that's mostly done in the gloom of a deep vault somewhere far from
home), split between the main
collection, the academic coins (typically bronze super-rarities in atrocious condition) to be kept, other less important non-duplicates that might be disposed of in time, and actual duplicates for disposal now. Also updated are my purchase records: I dispose of the actual invoices since anyway they are rarely descriptive, and make MS Word documents with all dealer-supplied information: seller photo and descriptions, which once a quarter, once
additions are logged in, I save in pdf format. It's my intention to bind up in hardback a colour print of all the pdfs going back 15 years or so sometime. I thought I'd share the process as maybe other's have different way of doing things. I suspect that even for 1000+ coin
collection, my book-keeping needs are much heavier than most because of the very high churn rate in my
collection: despite having built up the
collection over 30 years, each year perhaps 20% by number is added and perhaps 30% coins taken out the back and disposed of, and that does contain the seeds for potentially a great deal of chaos. That I'm only paying the difference between purchases and sales, and disposals numerically exceeding sales for many years past, does make it a
bit of an accounting nightmare to
work out what things have actually cost (do I apply FIFO or LIFO rules and such dilemmas!) but I try not to worry about that too much for now...
