What You Use For Your Inventories ?excel Of Db Programs ?

Tonymacq;
Question:
If you only itemise those items over 10 pounds, how do you know which unrecorded items in your collection, on a subsequent year, have entered your recording space? Revisit?

Fair enough question, and it comes back to the point I was making about the purpose of an inventory.

My inventory is primarily to show what items of value I have, and what their values are. This is for my own information (read satisfaction, gloating) and also to aid my heir when she has to dispose of my collection.

A secondary, side, effect of the inventory is that it can identify sleepers, like that Cochin stamp. It only made it into the inventory this year, but that triggered a check back over the catalogue years, which showed up the steady annual growth in its catalogue value.

As my collection is limited to the Indian States, and not all of them in any serious way, it's relatively simple to keep tabs on the serious gaps. I know precisely the gaps in my Barwani collection, which is my most serious: they're all major rarities, which might come up for sale once in 10 or 20 years, if I'm lucky.

At the sub-£10 level, I don't mind duplication in most of what I collect. For the most part, the stamps were printed locally, under less-than-ideal conditions, and there's variation between stamps. This makes a good number of 'duplicates' still interesting for subsequent study.

I also have some rather disorganised lists of sleepers. Some are simply in my own head, others on scraps of paper. I really should organise these properly some day, but then, I'm not an organised sort of person.

Which brings me back again to the purpose of an inventory. Organised types will (no doubt) want to have their inventories neatly organised. Those like me, who can exist happily in chaos, won't feel the need for such a high level of organisation. Now why does the term 'anal retentive' come to mind?

Incidentally, I have the Gibbons Part 1s (or their equivalents) for 1937, 1941, 1955, 1973, 1984, 1998, 2000 (first half, A-I only) and 2002-2013.

I don't mind doing a little historical research through the catalogues, if anyone needs it. No wholesale valuations, though!

What was the flag that caused you to realize that particular stamp exceeded your limit values, and how did you know you had it, if you don't keep track of all your inventory?: (from your 'disorganized list of sleepers?)I know in my inventory, such a limit would eliminate probably (at least) 90% of my inventory. For me, it would be an impossible task. I would be more interested in the total valuation of a country, (and all countries.) I can do a computer-based search by specified criteria for specific candidates, including as yet unspecified criteria.

Another point. For me, I began tracking my inventory across multiple catalog years, but gave up due to the complexity of carrying the data detail and maintaining it.(The pendulum swings back) I've rezorted to being happy knowing the year of the Catalog when I last reviewed a specific country, rather than the historical value based on past year's catalogues, and considering the vagueries of CV vs. true market (EBAY?) value.

Just curious, from an analytic point of view. Thanks for listening.

Certainly! No flags needed: each year when a new Gibbons Part 1 comes out, I check my collections against it. I also place tags in my stockbooks against the better items, even if they haven't yet crossed the threshold value.

This has a double value. Not only do I sweep up all the new entries for the spreadsheet (a bit laborious then going back and adding in the prior catalogue year data, but as I said, can be very instructive), but just occasionally, I find things I've overlooked previously. For example, this year I was running through my Bhopal collection, looking through these common 1884 ¼ Anna laid paper perforated stamps (SG 51)



when I turned up this



Before, I'd just pushed it aside as a nasty case of trimmed perfs. This time, I looked at it properly, realised it couldn't have trimmed perfs (it's a longish story, but trust me!), and was able to catalogue it as the rather scarce imperf version, SG 50. The perforated version, SG 51, is catalogued at £1; real world value, maybe $0.25. The imperf version, SG 50, is catalogued at £225; real world value is hard to say, because they come up so rarely.

Now, the question of actual values. First, you have to remember that I'm talking only of the Indian States - but I know them quite well. Scott is useless on the Indian States, so it can be ignored; Gibbons is the only general authority. The Indian States market isn't quite as big as, say, the United States market, and there are far fewer items offered for sale. That makes it much harder to establish a 'true market' value from ebay, or from the auctions, for that matter.

Nevertheless, you can probably generalise that for many Indian States, sold by reputable sellers (in this context, regrettably, that tends to mean Anglo-Celtic sellers in the UK), full current Gibbons catalogue values tend to be about the norm. Unpopular States sell at a discount, but unusual items (covers, multiples etc) even of the unpopular States may actually sell at a multiple of Gibbons.

Gibbons inevitably lags the market, and the market being so relatively thin, Gibbons has trouble valuing everything. However, taken over a five- or ten year-period, the catalogue values are a pretty accurate reflection of the market trends for a given item.

Very interesting; Thanks for sharing.

Art