Does your home insurance cover all your possessions?

The chances are it doesn’t, unless you’ve audited everything you own, worked out a full replacement value for each item and presented a list to your insurer.

Even if you are fully covered, how good would you be at listing the contents of every room on an insurance claim form after a fire or burglary?

Try it now, without looking. What’s in your living room? When did you buy each item? How much did you pay?

Excel at keeping inventories
Compiling an inventory of your possessions can be done easily using Excel.

It offers total flexibility so users decide what kind of information to store. It also lets users with no knowledge of databases or programming techniques sort, filter and print a list of their possessions in a variety of ways.

Values can be adjusted automatically to account for inflation, sub-totals for items such as jewellery can be computed, the contents of each room can be printed as a list, and ‘in situ’ pictures of valuable items can be included to prove their existence to an insurance company. Even if you’re an Excel beginner, we’ll tell you everything you need to know to get started.

The main reasons for keeping a detailed inventory is to arrange adequate insurance and to help when making a claim should the worst happen. However, a list of contents for each room in your home can also be invaluable when moving house or managing internal renovation and building projects. By creating a worksheet in Excel, you will be able to record the correct information for each item in your home.

Once a worksheet has been set up, the matching data for it can be collected by using, say, a clipboard or a voice recorder of some kind. Certain mobile phones and portable music players can be called into service for this purpose, while the best plan for notebook PC owners is to carry the computer from room to room, typing the details straight into an Excel worksheet.

Our instructions are for Excel 2003, but similar tools are found in other versions.

Designing a worksheet
An inventory should include a description and quantity for each item, plus a location, purchase price, purchase date and replacement value.

In case of theft, it’s a good idea to store the make, model and serial numbers of electrical items, and if a category is assigned to each item (such as furnishings or jewellery) it enhances the ways in which lists can be sorted and printed.

Two other useful features are space for suppliers’ names and additional notes. Copy the worksheet used in our example on the right and modify it to suit. The headings should be typed into row 1, starting at column A and finishing in column L.

They are: Item, Qty, Make, Model, Serial, Date, Supplier, Price, Location, Category, Value and Notes. Having typed these in, it’s a good idea to save the workbook, resaving your changes regularly.

Data entry and formatting
As soon as you start filling in the worksheet you will notice that some columns are too narrow to display their full contents and others are wider than they need to be. To resize the columns, point at the dividing line between any two columns (this must be done on the very top row where the letters are).