A shelf out-runs your memory
You bought it on release day, certain you’d build it that weekend. Two years later it’s still shrink-wrapped behind three others. You stand in a store genuinely unsure whether you already own the small one. And the set you kept meaning to buy is gone from the shelves and twice the price secondhand.
This is a workbook for that. Every set you own in one place — number, name, theme, year, piece count, minifigures, build status, condition, whether you kept the box and the instructions, where it actually lives, what you paid, and what you reckon it’s worth now.
Cost per piece, on every set
A price tag tells you what a set cost. Cost per piece tells you whether it was any good — and it’s the one comparison that works across a $50 botanical set and a $270 castle. Type what you paid and the workbook divides by the piece count on every row, then ranks your whole shelf by it on the dashboard.
It’s how you notice that the impulse buy you felt slightly silly about was better value than the flagship you agonized over, and how you know whether a wishlist price is a genuine deal or just a smaller number.
What’s still sealed — and what that pile cost
Every collector has the stack of boxes bought and never opened. The dashboard counts them, works out what share of your collection is still in the box, and tells you what that unbuilt pile cost you. Not to shame you — to get one of them onto the table this weekend.
The pieces that walked off
Log a missing piece on the Missing Parts tab — which set, what it is, the color, how many, where you’ll source it — and the outstanding count rolls straight back onto that set, flipping its Complete? flag until you’ve closed it out. The dashboard keeps a fix list.
A retirement read on every wishlist set
Record a wishlist set’s release year and its availability, and the Retirement Watch column gives you a verdict. Anything still available gets measured against a number you set on the dashboard: how long you reckon a set typically stays on shelves. Change the number and every verdict recalculates.
Be clear about what that is: it’s your own judgment applied consistently to your whole list, so the set you’ve been putting off for three years stops hiding among the ones you added last week. It is not a forecast, and the workbook has no idea what any manufacturer plans.
Honest about “value”
The workbook does arithmetic on numbers you give it. It does not look up, fetch, or estimate what anything is worth — you type in what you paid and what you believe a set is worth today, and it computes cost per piece, gain and loss, and the collection totals from those.
So it is not an appraisal, a price guide, or investment advice. Paper value isn’t real until someone pays it, minus fees and shipping and the afternoon you spend packing it. Track it because it’s genuinely interesting and because insurance asks — not because a column told you to buy.
One practical note: because the file pairs what you own with where in your home it lives, treat it like any other record of valuables. Keep it somewhere private, and if you send it to an insurer, send it to them directly rather than posting it anywhere public.
Own it, don’t rent it
A blank spreadsheet is free, and a weekend of building columns that still don’t compute cost per piece. A collector app means an account, someone else’s server, and someone else’s roadmap — and the good free ones tend to start charging once you want more than a list.
This is one file you own. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice Calc — and the Google Sheets version is a ready-made native copy, not an import you have to fix; it lands in your own Drive, private to you. It will still open in ten years.
Try it first
Want to see how it feels before you buy? The free set-shelf starter is a one-tab taste of the full workbook — log a set per row and see what’s still sealed. And if you collect more than bricks, the rest of the Trackers line catalogs the other things you love the same way.
Not affiliated with the LEGO Group
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this product. This is an independent tracking template made for people who collect the bricks. The example collection built into the workbook is fictional — every set name, number, and price is invented to show the math working, and the set numbers use an EX-nn format so they can’t be mistaken for real catalog numbers.
