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February 14, 2007

An inventory will save you money

I had a chance to work on my collection over the weekend after returning from the American Philatelic Society show in Riverside and relearned one of those slap-your-forehead lessons: If you’re a serious collector you need to keep track of what you buy.

As I started sorting several purchases of U.S. postal cards and Canadian stamps, I realized that the lack of an inventory that was updated as I bought new material meant I had purchased a lot of material more than once.

Fortunately, most of the material wasn’t terribly expensive as individual items, but the total cost probably came to a few hundred dollars — money I could have used to buy stamps or covers I didn’t already own rather than duplicates.

If you collect something for which there is no catalog, or you don’t want to buy the catalog, you can still get an inventory by photocopying or scanning your collection and taking the pages with you. This system is especially useful if you collect such things as specific cachets for first-day covers or first flights and need to compare what you have to what a dealer is offering.

There are many ways to keep an inventory, including a handwritten list, marking a catalog or checklist, developing a spreadsheet or buying one of the databases prepared especially for stamp collectors. My favorite is EZStamp by SoftPro. I’ve had the program for several years but didn’t started using it until recently. EZStamp includes pictures of the stamps it catalogs, allows the printing of several types of lists, such as what I own, what I want or the program’s total database for any of its countries. It uses Scott catalog numbers but also allows you to punch in numbers from other catalogs — especially useful if you use a foreign catalog. the use of other numbers. It comes on eight CDs or one DVD and covers most of the world’s regularly collected countries.

It’s updated every year, an important feature for those of us who try to collect some modern issues, too, and the updates are offered at a discount price to registered owners of the program.

SoftPro also offers programs for coin collectors, other stamp collecting programs and even some general software.

Obviously, however, no inventory will help you if you don’t keep it up. So learn from my laziness, pick a system and get to it.