Investment calculations - anyone here proficient in Excel??

I'm only 3 years into this hobby but have been surprised at how the value of some of my most basic trees has risen during that time. SO, I just wondered if anyone would be able to either point me to free software that might enable me to keep an ongoing track of each of the 20+ trees I have or else help me put together an Excel formula I could use as I'm useless with formulae in the program - know what I'm trying to achieve but can never get the formulae to work

I'd want to have the price of the tree when I got it, the age (the age at purchase added to however many years I've owned it), the investment cost put in each year, all totalling an incremental yearly value (basically the end price it could technically be sold for if required). (Anything else I've missed perhaps?). So if I bought a 5-yo tree for £20 (I've an extremely limited budget!! ) in 2015, and spend roughly between £10 and £30 on average p/a on care, that would leave the price after 3 years coming to roughly £65-70? Unless I'm totally wrong on how you determine what to sell a tree for?

I could possibly spend a few days working on the calculations manually but mentally my brains way too foggy on pain meds to want to do that hence seeking a slightly faster method.

Any suggestions appreciated

Hi TKR99,

Hope this helps. Column B,C,D can be used. replicate according to your needs.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1isYIaPhzNg8wyqnnd-BW_gNP3fB4K3BSZFg17UI-2JE/edit?usp=sharing

Good day!

Ahh Oogway - you're a GEM for taking the time to provide that for me. Looks perfect and just what I need. I'm just in a situation where if anything happened to me, I worry that the trees might all end up just being given away or worse dumped because they don't all yet look like "proper" bonsai to the unitiated so I figure that if I can show their value at least it might procure them a new home or some extra finance for my family etc. So there's a valid reason for it - though perhaps many others undertake such calculations regularly anyway especially if they own far more expensive trees than I do . Thanks again, Romayne

Your Welcome, Happy to help.

Good day!

TKR

i hope you are just as diligent with the important aspects of your trees, such as dates of major work, repotting and issue resolution & methods....

you know, the truly important aspects of bonsai record keeping

Yip - I try to be . I've a folder full of impertinent info on each of trees from a notable bonsai site which provides the basic info on what each tree needs etc. Then I started last year with a yearly calendar of what the tree looked like each month or two and anything that was done to it. Problem for me is that it's now 20 pages (for just about as many trees) and isn't the tidiest with some trees getting more scrawled notes than others. But I'm a photo addict so I'm just in the process now of organising them as well. My concern is trying to find the best way to marry all the various bits of info together cohesively. I found reading back through the file that other questions I had recently were already answered by my own notes from last year so it's one of my failings to not check the file enough to get a better idea of what I need to do and when. Is there a more organised way of doing this I wonder LOL!?