How do you manage/track and keep a handle on your collection

[Brian Van Horn]

I scan the cards, title the scans and put the cards in the bank.

[tbob]

You guys are amazing, keeping track of every card you bought, who you bought it from and how much and when you paid. Incredible!
I have no clue. I have a list of every graded card I have, set name, player name, color variations if any, grade. Period. The ungraded cards are in sets and I just have, for instance, "T207 set complete." Period.

[smtjoy]

I use VCP my collection (a few thousand cards), I even enter my raw cards and just make a note that they are raw and guessing the grade. Its great because each group/set value is updated as cards are sold so my values change every day. It will also download into excel which is another bonus. Here is how it looks online-

This is a listing of groups and as you can see how many cards are listed inside, the *cost is the price of cards that have previous sales and the current value of them-


This is a listing inside a group of each card and value-


Been a huge help to my collection.

[HoofHearted]

I used Excel spreadsheets, too. It proved invaluable as I worked to complete my '62 Topps baseball set. It helped to keep track of the costs (including postage, grading of raw cards, etc.). Now that I may need to sell it, I have at least a reasonable idea of what I'd like to get for it.

As I was putting the set together I also used VCP to keep track of the cards I needed and any auctions that were going for the cards I needed. I tried to start an inventory of what I had but liked the spreadsheets better. At one point I thought about what would happen if VCP disappeared -- I'd lose all that work!

I'm now keeping my Senators/Twins collection in a spreadsheet to track what I have, the cost, etc. Very handy!

[FrankWakefield]

Mentally, poorly, and incompetently, that's how.


Recently, I've started chasing an odd set of cards, I have about 3 dozen of them, and I have a ways to go. They're all in a stack beside my desk pc. And this works well. If I see a card from the set listed on eBay, I shuffle through my stack to see if it's in there. Not a perfect system, because I could bid on a card of a player having already bought one of his cards a few days earlier but not yet having arrived.... but it works fairly well. No system is foolproof, not even the spreadsheet stuff. All it takes is some delay in entering whether you've bought a certain card, or whether it's arrived. Then you can buy a card twice or overlook one.

First time through on the white border cards, I used photocopies of pages of an old Beckett catalog. That worked fairly well, I penciled in when I got one. Eventually started adding acquisition date. I numbered the 400th one, and started adding a number for each one thereafter, so I had a running count of how many different fronts I had. I carried that list to a few shows years ago, and would get odd looks.