How Do You Catalog Your Coins?

I have an Excel spreadsheet with columns listing coin denomination, face value, date of purchase, purchase price, and grade. I have a column for the gold or silver value of bullion coins and a column for numismatic value for coins having a significant value over melt. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, I have a row that gives a sum of the purchase prices and current prices of all of the coins, based on the price of gold and silver or the current numismatic values, as the case may be. I then have a field at the bottom that adds up everything for a grand total, then I have a field for net gain over purchase price and a field for percent gain over purchase price. At the top of the spreadsheet I have a field for the current spot price of gold and the current spot price of silver; at any time, I can plug in the current prices of gold and silver, and bam! I have a good estimate of the total current value of my entire collection, the current net gain for the total investment, and the current percent gain. Obviously, the totals I come up with are not what I could expect to yield from selling the whole lot, but it's close enough for practical purposes.

Never could figure out why anyone would buy a program to keep track of their coins. Almost all ocmputers today have Excel and that is all most need. More than that becomes a loss of fun for the hobby.

I purchased an older version of what Dave H has, CoinsPlus-2000 Gold edition. It's a great database for what I do.

I just use the table function of Word. As others have indicated approximate values change and when you have 7000+ different coin types following values in a meaningful way would be pretty hard.

I list by country (or more accurately issuing authority) then by ruler or republic etc, I keep this as up to date as possible just so I don't buy duplicates. I also have a photo dabase of everything again split into the same categories as above.

All my better coins I photograph and then write up in html and add them to my website. This makes a great way to view the images and think about what I want to get next.

I have started with an Excel spreadsheet. I have each of the countries in a different tab or worksheet. Then columns with year, mint mark, variety, denomination, grade, quantity, value, and notes. As I am just starting the grade column right now is completely empty on all my sheet. I hope once I have worked with the coins a bit more I will feel comfortable enough to assign grades, but for right now I am just working to sort through everything that I have.