Inventory Questions

I am considering reorganizing my inventory for my various collections. Currently the inventory is in a variety of Excel documents, notebooks, and even those green column pads.

I have looked at EZStamps, StampCat, and Stamp Manage.

Specific needs include the ability to create an accurate inventory of country and topic collections, printing out want lists, easy set up of inventory documents, easy search parameters to find, for example, Scouts on Stamps, generally following the Scott Catalog numbers (not a requirement, but a plus), and the ability to add non-Scott material to the electronic inventory.

Are there other programs I'm missing that I ought to take a look at?

Finally, a related side note. Doesn't it seem this would be an ideal area for Scott to move into? Do you suppose they feel they'll make more from licensing?

If I were Scott I would stay far away from it. It isn't part of what they do well, and probably don't even have a department that it would fit into. I might possibly look into licensing the name to somebody else, and possibly even doing the distribution of...but I wouldn't have anything to do with developing/maintaining/supporting it. It's too much work in an area that they don't know much about.

According to some hints dropped by Charles Snee at another board, Amos will be releasing an online, (I assume) subscription based searchable catalog sometime this year. He wouldn't elaborate further as to how searchable it would be. Ideally it would be searchable by any field in the catalog - color, year of issue, paper type, denomination, etc. I'm not holding my breath that it'll be that good, but we'll just have to wait and see. All they'd have to do to allow users to inventory is put a little checkbox next to the listing for someone to add it to their collection. From there it should be a piece of cake to print out a want list. Allowing one to print album pages on the fly would be more involved and I'd be shocked if the first release had something like this, but it's a logical step at some point.

Undertakings like this often face delays, but I'm hoping we'll see this sometime soon.

I have used StampCat for a number of years and do like it, a bit of learning curve but does the job and one is able to customize it. The problem with it is that as you may know, it is no longer under development. The user forum is still active though.
The program is available but I do not know if it just the demo or a full blown unit.

If you have a collection already in Excel or Txt then you can import into it.

I wanted to change my inventory software but none of the other programs lend themselves to easy import. Some developers will say they will examine your file (StampCat is a MDB file) and see if it can be done, others just say no. I think they are missing the boat here with inventory software users as I don't mind a charge for the service as long as its reasonable. Much better than manually entering 12,000 stamps by hand.

In my opinion, I think EZStamp is very good (Demo is nice) but again I cannot import into it and the cost is slightly prohibitive for a worldwide collector.
I own two of the EZStamp developers other programs and support of them is superb. Mario is very receptive to any questions.

edmorgan if you looking for more inventory programs you might try the very top of SCF and click on the Free Apps by LignUp, another option.

Also 51Studebaker has a few comments on the various database methods, I think they are in software section. Interesting reading.
Good luck in your search and would be interested in your decision.

Chuck

What about the APS?

I just ask because I remember a long topic asking weather APS members got their money's worth from their memberships.


-IBFS

I have taken a completely different approach to inventory. I now take snapshots from my iPhone of my album pages and upload them to Evernote. Every time I add a stamp I take a photo then delete the old photo. It's very quick and takes much less time than many of the inventory programs. I tag the album and page for quick lookup. Now if there was a searchable online catalog I could skip writing catalog numbers for the missing stamps.