Essays
What spreadsheets eventually forget.
Nearly every collection starts in a spreadsheet, and that is the correct place to start. It costs nothing, it needs no decisions, and for the first dozen watches it genuinely works. The failure is slow enough that nobody notices the day it happens.
What a spreadsheet loses is not rows. Rows are safe. What it loses is everything that never became a column — because adding a column is a decision, and decisions get deferred.
The things that never get a column
Service history is the clearest case. It is not one value; it is a sequence of events, each with a date, a watchmaker, a cost and a list of what was replaced. A spreadsheet can hold "last serviced 2019" and nothing else, so that is what gets recorded, and the detail that actually supports the watch's value ends up in an email nobody can find.
Provenance goes the same way. So do valuations, which are only meaningful as a series — one figure with no date and no basis is close to useless to an insurer. So does anything with a document attached, because a spreadsheet cell cannot hold an invoice, and a filename in a cell is a promise about a folder that will eventually be reorganised.
The quiet corruption
There is a subtler failure, and it is worse because it looks like success. A spreadsheet stays tidy by overwriting. Last year's valuation is replaced by this year's. A status changes from "considering" to "owned" and the earlier state is gone. Nothing looks wrong — the sheet is clean, current, and quietly missing its own history.
Then somebody asks the one question that needs it. What did this appraise at before the market moved? When did you actually buy it? Those answers existed and were tidied away, one cell edit at a time, by somebody being conscientious.
The one that costs money
Insurance is where the gap becomes expensive. A schedule needs, per piece, a reference number, a serial number, a current valuation and its basis. Most spreadsheets have two of those four, and the valuation is a remembered figure rather than a documented one. That is discovered at a claim, which is the worst possible time to discover it.
Where the software fits — and where it does not
Watch Vault Archive imports a spreadsheet rather than asking anyone to retype one, and gives the things that never fitted a column — service events, valuation history, attached documents — somewhere permanent to live. What it cannot do is recover what a spreadsheet already overwrote. Nothing can. The history that was tidied away is gone, and importing a clean sheet imports exactly what the sheet still holds.
One thing worth doing today
Open your sheet and find the oldest valuation in it. Ask where the previous figure went, and whether you could prove today what the watch was appraised at three years ago.
If the answer is no, that is not a filing problem. It is the record forgetting in real time, and it will keep doing it until something else holds the history.
More essays · How to insure a collection · Servicing costs and intervals