PROVENANCE is a collection inventory and valuation platform for rare book, trading card, print, and watch collectors. Spreadsheets cannot value a first edition. PROVENANCE records cost basis, condition grade, and provenance, then tracks live market value, unrealized gain and loss, and fires alerts when comps sell.
The dashboard aggregates every item into a single portfolio view: total value, cost basis, unrealized gain and loss, a 24-month value history, allocation by category, your top movers, and any concentration risk that needs attention.
Most collectors track what they paid, not what they hold. That gap between a remembered purchase price and a defensible current value is where insurance claims fail, estate settlements stall, and good sell decisions get missed.
A spreadsheet is a snapshot, not a ledger. It cannot pull a comp, adjust for grade, or tell you that your Gatsby is now worth 22% more than you paid. Every row you never update is a valuation you no longer trust.
In collectibles, grade is the price. A PSA 10 outsells a PSA 8 by more than three times, and a Near Fine copy in jacket commands a 45% premium over the same book without one. A flat list of titles hides the single variable that moves value most.
Most collectors can name what they paid but not what they hold. Without a live valuation you cannot spot a category quietly carrying half your net worth, cannot tell an insurer what to cover, and cannot decide which piece is the right one to sell.
PROVENANCE is built from five connected systems: specialist catalog templates, a condition-adjusted valuation engine, a provenance and document vault, insurance and estate reporting, and market alerts. Each one works on its own and all five share one ledger.
Choose a category and the item form rewrites itself. Rare books ask for printing points and jacket state. Cards ask for grading company, grade, and population. Watches ask for reference, movement, and box and papers. You can add your own fields per category at any time.
Every item carries a base comp drawn from eBay sold listings, Heritage Auctions, PSA, Chrono24, and AbeBooks. PROVENANCE multiplies that comp by the item’s condition or grade factor, so a PSA 10 is valued at roughly 3.4 times a PSA 8 and a Near Fine copy in jacket at 1.45 times the same book without one.
$34,000
1.45x
$45,900
Every ownership transfer, appraisal, restoration, and authentication is recorded as a dated event with its supporting document attached. The timeline exports on its own and is folded into the estate inventory, so an heir or an insurer inherits the full story rather than a box of receipts.
Bauman Rare Books, New York
Acquired for the recorded cost basis. Second state with the corrected "chatter" text on p.
Peter Harrington
Collation and point check confirmed; second state per Bruccoli.
Whitfield & Coe, Fine Art Appraisers
Replacement value set at $46,400 for schedule purposes.
Generate a formatted insurance schedule, an estate inventory, or a tax lot schedule directly from your ledger. Each report carries the item details a carrier or an executor expects, and flags concentration risk when a single category carries more than forty percent of portfolio value.
Write a rule and PROVENANCE watches for you: a target price on a reference, any graded sale of a specific card, appreciation above a set percentage in a category, or a concentration warning. Triggered rules surface in a feed with unread badges and a bell in the header.
Daytona breaks $30k
Chrono24 completed sale, full set
Mantle #311 in PSA 4
Heritage signature auction, lot 28
Rare books up 6.8% / 90d
Signed Modern Firsts leading
PROVENANCE ships with dedicated templates for rare books and manuscripts, vintage sports cards, antiquarian prints, and luxury watches. Each captures the fields that actually move value in that market, and each carries its own condition and grade multipliers.
The figures below are drawn from the platform\u2019s tracked collections and appraised schedules. Average annual appreciation is calculated item by item against recorded cost basis and acquisition date, not estimated at the portfolio level.
A first-edition Gatsby in near-fine condition typically appreciates 8 to 12% annually. Vintage sports cards have run hotter and far more volatile, with the step from PSA 8 to PSA 10 tripling value on the same card. Steel sports watches have averaged 9 to 14% annually, driven almost entirely by reference and dial variant rather than brand.
Median time to add an item with a category template, condition grade, cost basis, and provenance document attached.
A spreadsheet stores text in cells. PROVENANCE applies condition multipliers, pulls comparable sales, warns on concentration risk, and generates the reports an insurer or an executor asks for. This table sets out the difference field by field.
| Capability | Spreadsheet | PROVENANCE |
|---|---|---|
| Condition and grade multipliers applied to value | Manual, often omitted | Applied automatically |
| Comparable sales pulled from the market | Never | Continuous across five sources |
| Real-time value and unrealized gain and loss | Stale on entry | Recalculated per item |
| Provenance and document vault | A folder, if you are disciplined | Dated timeline per item |
| Insurance and estate reports | Rebuilt by hand each year | One click, PDF or CSV |
| Concentration risk warning | Not possible | Fires above 40% in one category |
| Alerts on comparable sales | None | Target, keyword, category, and risk rules |
| Time to add an item | Minutes, inconsistently | About eleven seconds |
PROVENANCE is used by book collectors, card graders, print buyers, and watch owners. Each of the collectors below moved a collection off a spreadsheet and onto a ledger that carries grade, provenance, and live comps.
I ran a forty-year collection on a spreadsheet and a shoebox of receipts. PROVENANCE found two items I had undervalued by more than eleven thousand dollars, and the insurance schedule it produced took one click instead of one weekend.
The grade multiplier is the part nobody else gets right. I can see exactly what a PSA 9 copy is worth against my PSA 8 in the same set, which is the whole game when you are deciding what to submit.
When my father died, the estate inventory PROVENANCE generated had a provenance timeline for every watch. The appraiser said it was the cleanest file he had received in twenty years of practice.
Eight direct answers on how PROVENANCE values a collectible, which categories it supports, how provenance documents are stored, and what the reports contain.
Add your first item in eleven seconds. Bring your whole ledger across later. No card required to start.
Demo workspace runs locally, no account needed
Each entry below shows the condition grade applied, the recorded cost basis, the current value it produces, and the unrealized gain it carries. Open any of them to see the full valuation history, provenance timeline, document vault, and comparable sales.
