Small Asset and Home Inventory Tracker Spreadsheet
Easily track your household inventory and other small assets and include their value in your total net worth.
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Easily track the cost and potential resale value of your household inventory and other small assets and include their value in your total net worth.
From Tiller Community member and spreadsheet builder @jpfieber:
I often resell items when I no longer need them, or have upgraded to a better version. Because of this, I tend to see the embedded value in some of my assets, and I’d like to be able to track that value as part of my Net Worth.
After all, I could sell many of my assets, converting them to cash, which would then clearly be part of my Net Worth.
Please describe your workflow. What are the sheets? Does it use any custom scripts or formulas?
I first added a manual account called ‘Small Assets’ (I have separate manual accounts for large assets like ‘Home’ and vehicles). I
I then added a column to my Transactions worksheet, and named it ‘Value’. For any transaction that reflects something I’d consider a sellable asset, I add what I think I could sell it for.
For example, I recently purchased a freezer. For the credit card transaction, in the Value column, I put $500.00, assuming I should be able to get at least that much back selling it used.
This is obviously something that needs to be revisited periodically, as the value is likely to decrease or increase over time, depending on the asset.
Some assets values would also need to be removed once the asset was sold.
With all the values established, you could just select the column and see what the ‘sum’ of the value, but I realized my transactions are only reflecting some of my assets.
I have many other ‘small assets’ that I don’t want to have to create manual accounts for to track. To solve this, I created a ‘Small Assets’ sheet with two sections.
In the ‘Manually Entered Assets’ section, I enter the information for any assets that don’t appear in my transactions, either because they were purchased before my transactions were started, or maybe they don’t have a transaction (created a new asset from scratch, etc).
I then have a ‘Combined Assets’ section that uses a query to look both at the Manually Entered Assets, and any transactions with an assigned Value in the Transactions sheet. It combines these into one list, and displays the total ‘Cost’ of all the assets, as well as the total ‘Value’ of the assets.
You can periodically update your ‘Small Assets’ manual account with the current value displayed in your ‘Small Assets’ sheet, and that value will be displayed on your Balances sheet, and will be reflected in your Net Worth!
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Another awesome idea from you. Good stuff man!
Thanks for the post. Regarding normal transaction cataloging, would the purchase of a Small Asset, such as a Rolex be considered an Investment “Transfer” Category or something different? Knowing a Rolex retains its value, I wouldn’t consider it a standard purchase but rather an investment.
I would think another way of thinking about it would be to create an account for it. You’d make the purchase transaction a transfer, and then manually update the account with the value. You could periodically update the manual account with any changes in the value. This is really what the Small Asset Tracker does, but with fewer accounts, but for something like this, it might make sense to have an account for it.
OK but at the core the transaction could be logged as “transfer”?
Yea, it could be a transfer to whatever account the rolex is a part of.