How To Inventory Your Coins

Table of Contents:

Guide to Understanding Your Coins 

• How to Get Started 

• How to Inventory Your Coins 

• How to Handle Your Coins 

• How to Identify Your Coins 

• How to Grade Your Coins 

• How to Sell Your Coins 

• How to Store Your Coins 

Whether or not you are planning to sell or keep the coins, you first need to identify what coins you have and make sure you have documentation for later reference.  Let's start there.

Going through this process will help you start to get your head wrapped around what it is you have.  For some this may be a few short pages and 20 or 30 pictures.  For others...say those that have 12 Xerox boxes full of coins, you are looking at a much larger endeavor.  Another reason is for insurance purposes.  You'll want to make sure you have a record of your inventory should anything happen such as a fire or theft.  Lastly, at some point you maybe will want to communicate with someone concerning the collection.  Maybe to get it evaluated, maybe to discuss a sale.  It would be really helpful for this discussion if you can send them your list of inventory with included images via email.

There are a few tools available online to help you with this inventory process.  Some folks prefer Google Workspace, some prefer Microsoft O365.  There is also Open Office and Libre Office for those looking to avoid the big corporate type software companies.  For your awareness, I use the Google Workspace apps, combining Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, email and lastly Google Sites to bring you the information on this site.  I don't endorse or recommend any of these products, please review and choose what you are most comfortable with.

I have provided some examples below.  Your initial effort is to capture as much information for each coin as possible.  Please be sure to see the section that discusses how to handle your coins.  I will also be covering how to identify coins that are not immediately recognizable.  In the examples below, the 1st couple are tables created within Google Docs.  I provided information about the coin and then the images of the front and back of the coin.  The images were taken with my phone, cropped and then pasted into the table.  You can do this via Google Doc app or on a computer desktop.  Whichever is more convenient for you.

In the 2nd example, I display how you can use  Google sheets to handle larger collections.  Here, we are dealing with large numbers of coins.  20 Liberty Walking Half Dollars are a lot to itemize within a Google Doc table. In the Sheet, I can reference the coin and breakdown what years and quantity.  Pictures can be stored in Google Drive and referenced in the tracking sheet. 

These 2 examples are a good start to your overall inventory.  You will need to see which one will work better for you.  It will be different for every collection and purpose.  I found it difficult to get anyone interest in reviewing a Google Sheet inventory of my collection but when I put samples in to a Google Doc table, those reviewing my coins were far more receptive.