Do you catalog your collection?

[Extra Crispy]

I've started to catalog my collections before and never really stuck with it. But as this year and next (and probably '18 and '19) are devoted to cleaning up my collections, i thought it was a good time to revive the project. I am focusing on units, so my catalog is very simple: Period / Nation / Scale / Unit Type / Unit / No Stands / Notes. The period, scale and nation are the sheet title, so my catalog has just 4 columns. A typical entry reads:

Gun | m18 150mm Howitzer | 4 | Deployed, Towed, CO, Movers
Tank | Panzer Company | 16 | PzIV HQ, 2 x PzIV Plt, 1 x PzIII Plt

This tells me this is a 4 gun battery with limbered and unlimbered guns, a CO stand and associated movers (I don't bother listing every specific vehicle). I use color coding on my miniature stands and the sheet has a corresponding color code in the Type column. So I can find the right unit by looking for the ID color in the box. The ID coding makes sorting and clean up easy. With loads of transports it would be easy to lose track. I am also slowly making up tray cards for them as well (pieces of paper with a box for each stand so players know what they have, and makes sure during clean up everything gets sorted back to its proper place).

I'm keeping it on Google docs so if I hit a flea market or Ebay (my armies are in outside storage) I can check and see how much overlap I have with what's on offer.

I don't bother with manufacturer as I don't know in many cases and frankly don't really care.

Do you have a catalog of your armies?

[Extra Crispy]

Example tray card:

[paul]

I have each Brigade or regiment separated in it's ow tray. Then I have a master spreadsheet with the vehicles per unit.

[Donald M. Scheef]

Definitely; I keep records in XL spreadsheet, so I can sort by manufacturer, era, nation, type, and name. The actual models are in shallow boxes (I cut down paper shipping boxes) on home-built shelves (crude but effective).

Don S.

[Hoth_902]

I have no choice but to catalog. I am an engineer by trade so its in my DNA to keep inventory. Currently I have about 400 pieces split between WWII and modern. Since my collection is exclusively GHQ I do not list manufacturer. The inventory resides in excel and I have fields for the following.

Nation
Type (MBT, IFV...etc)
MIlitary designation (M577, T-90, M1A2.. Etc
Description (Tiger, MRAP, challenger... etc)
Service history (start_finish)
Quanity
Painted started
Painted Complete

I have not begun to form actual units yet, but I bet when I do, the fields will change.

[6mmwargaming]

I've started cataloguing stuff recently so I can figure out what is needed to complete an army and what spares I have. I list the vehicle, quantity, manufacturer, amount I need (TOE) and spare, all done by each army. Excel is great for this. However with my Modern Soviets it is tricky as I keep finding models all over the place!

Cheers
Kieran

[ferret701]

I've attempted, on numerous occasions, to catalog my collection. However, I've focused on just the smaller armies, and some of the larger ones, such as modern Soviet or Cold War US Army, haven't really been updated in five or six year. Given that I have something like 14,000 models at this point, it would take a lot of hours to sort it all out.

The current inventory, such as it is, is on my website in Excel:

[url]http://www.microarmormayhem.com/Inventory.xls[/url]

[panzergator]

Spread sheet. Units [such as 1-32 AR, 1-48 I(M)] across the top with THREE subordinate columns, Authorized, On Hand, and Short (abbreviated AUTH, OH, SHORT). Also TOTAL and SHORT columns rolled up at the end of the sheet.

Vehicle type listed in left hand column vertically (Tank M60A1, IFV, M2, M577). Still working on it, though.

[redleg]

I use excel spreadsheets to manage my inventory as well, but I also made some MTOE sheets for specific units. Got a little carried away when work was slow. Nothing terribly original...I copied the format from an existing document.