Quick answer
A spreadsheet wins for collections under 50 coins or collectors who want total control. A dedicated app like MyCoinage wins for collections over 50 coins, anyone who wants live valuations, or any collector planning to insure, probate, or sell in the next five years.
TL;DR
- Spreadsheets are free, flexible, and yours forever, but you maintain the price data yourself
- Apps automate valuation, provenance attachments, and exports, but charge a subscription
- The break-even point is roughly 50 coins or £5,000 total value
- Hybrid approach: use the app as the live system, export monthly to a spreadsheet backup
- The single biggest spreadsheet failure mode is stale price data
Table of contents
- What each approach actually costs
- Where spreadsheets win
- Where apps win
- The hidden cost of DIY pricing
- Migration: spreadsheet to app
- The hybrid approach
- Common questions
- FAQ
What each approach actually costs
| Dimension | Spreadsheet | Coin app (MyCoinage Pro) |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | Free (Sheets) or £60/yr (365) | £28.99/yr |
| Time to set up | 2-4 hours building template | 15 minutes |
| Time per 100 coins entered | 2-3 hours | 45-60 minutes |
| Price updates | Manual, ~2 hours/month | Automatic, hourly |
| Insurance PDF | Build yourself | One click |
| Mobile access | Sheets only | Yes, responsive |
| Backup | You handle | Handled |
| Lock-in | None | CSV export any time |
The honest cost of a spreadsheet isn't zero, it's your time, compounded over years. A collector who spends two hours a month refreshing prices manually burns 24 hours a year. At any reasonable hourly value, the app pays for itself before March.
Where spreadsheets win
Total customisation
Want a column for "coins my grandfather gave me"? A conditional formatting rule that highlights any coin bought below spot? A pivot table that shows gains by decade acquired? Spreadsheets do all of it. Apps make you use the fields they ship with.
Offline-forever durability
A spreadsheet file opens on any device, any decade, forever. In thirty years, your great-grandchild can still read an .xlsx file. In thirty years, no one can promise any specific cloud service will exist. For archival records, the catalogue an executor will one day inherit, that matters.
No subscription creep
Pay-once or free. No monthly bill. No "we've restructured our plans and Basic now costs double". The terms-of-service risk with apps is real; with a local file it's zero.
Where apps win
Live valuations
This is the decisive point for anyone with more than trivial money in coins. MyCoinage's price pipeline pulls realised sales from Spink, Baldwin's, Noonans and eBay completed transactions, aggregates them by grade, and updates hourly. Your portfolio value on the dashboard reflects last week's hammer prices, not a 2019 catalogue estimate you forgot to refresh.
A spreadsheet's price column is true on the day you type it and degrades from there. Six months on, every figure is a guess.
Integrated rarity and mintage data
Every coin in MyCoinage's catalogue carries official mintage figures, a computed rarity score, and grade distribution across known auction appearances. To get the same data in a spreadsheet you'd need to subscribe to Spink's database, scrape Numista, or maintain it by hand.
Watchlist and price alerts
A watchlist that pings your phone when a target coin comes up at auction is only possible in a live system. Spreadsheets don't ping. The price alerts feature alone saves collectors money by catching auction spikes early.
Leaderboards and community
MyCoinage's leaderboard and explore pages let you see what serious collectors are buying and benchmark your collection against peers. Pointless to some, valuable to others, but a spreadsheet offers zero of it.
The hidden cost of DIY pricing
When you run a spreadsheet you become responsible for three things an app handles silently:
- Sourcing prices. Where do you even look? eBay "completed" filter, Spink auction archive, Heritage Auctions, Numista community values? Each source has quirks.
- Normalising prices. Auction hammer price plus buyer's premium, minus any inferred condition differences, adjusted for currency if US-sourced. Every figure needs the same treatment or your totals are nonsense.
- Refreshing prices. On what schedule? Quarterly? A sovereign's spot value moves daily. A numismatic premium moves monthly. Pick a cadence and stick to it.
Most spreadsheet catalogues I've seen have one price column filled in on the day the row was created and never updated. That's not valuation, that's acquisition cost masquerading as valuation.
Migration: spreadsheet to app
If you're ready to move, the process is straightforward.
Step 1: Clean the spreadsheet
Standardise column headers: denomination, year, mintmark, grade, acquisition_date, acquisition_price, notes. Resolve blanks in key fields, a blank year breaks the import.
Step 2: Export to CSV
UTF-8 encoded. If you're on Excel, "Save As > CSV UTF-8", the default CSV export loses accented characters.
Step 3: Import to MyCoinage
The import tool on the coins page accepts CSV and auto-matches rows to the catalogue. Expect ~90% auto-match on British coinage, with the remainder needing a manual selection from the suggested catalogue entries.
Step 4: Verify the first 10 rows
Don't trust the import blind. Spot-check the first ten rows for correct catalogue match and grade preservation. Fix any drifts before adding more data.
Step 5: Archive the spreadsheet
Don't delete it. Save it dated, put it in a "historical" folder. In 18 months you might want to confirm what the catalogue looked like pre-migration.
The hybrid approach
For paranoid collectors, and I include myself, run both. MyCoinage is the working catalogue; a quarterly CSV export to Google Sheets is the backup. If the app vanished tomorrow you'd lose three months of changes but never the whole record. Export is two clicks from account settings; set a calendar reminder for the first of each quarter.
Why not monthly?
You could. Quarterly is the threshold where export friction starts outweighing paranoia. Find your own cadence.
Common questions
Can Google Sheets pull live coin prices?
Not reliably. You can scrape the Royal Mint bullion page with IMPORTHTML, but there's no public API for numismatic realised prices. That's the gap apps fill.
Is Excel or Google Sheets better for coin cataloguing?
Google Sheets if you want mobile and sharing. Excel if you want pivot tables and complex formulas. Neither solves the price-data problem.
What if I only have 20 coins?
Spreadsheet. Genuinely. Twenty coins is easy to track, easy to value (you can check each one manually once a quarter), and not worth a subscription. Revisit when you cross 50.
Can I use Airtable instead of a spreadsheet?
Airtable sits between a spreadsheet and an app. Better than Sheets for structure, weaker than a dedicated coin app for catalogue integration. Fine for small collections, not ideal for large.
FAQ
Q: Which is more secure?
A: Spreadsheets on local storage are vulnerable to drive failure. Cloud-based (Sheets, MyCoinage) depends on the provider's security posture. Both should have 2FA enabled.
Q: Do professional numismatists use apps or spreadsheets?
A: Most dealers use specialised stock software (StockIt, CoinZone). Collectors split roughly 60/40 in favour of apps among the under-50s, reversed among the over-70s.
Q: What about CoinManage or Exact Change?
A: Capable Windows desktop apps, loyal userbases. Weaker UK coverage than MyCoinage, no mobile, no cloud sync. See the digital coin album roundup for more.
Q: Will an app replace my need for a professional valuation?
A: No. For insurance above £10,000 per item, or probate for IHT purposes, get a written valuation from a registered valuer. The app is the day-to-day record.
Q: Is it worth tracking coins I bought as gifts?
A: Yes, tag them "gift received" in the notes field. Cost basis is zero, which matters for CGT if you ever sell. Are old coins worth anything covers the inherited-coin case.