Do you record your preps?

[Scythe13]

I've just popped another thread asking about time periods for preps and whether people plan to get X amount of time's worth of preps, and then stop.

This thought then occurred. The only way to really know what time period's worth of preps you have stored and sorted is if you register and record your stores, e.g. spreadsheet, clipboard, tally sheet, etc. If you have "a load of tins and bottled water" stored, how can you accurately know how long it'll last? The simplest way is to keep track of everything you have. For example, my wife is a vegetarian, so I have to keep equal numbers of beans and sausage for me, as I do beans and vegetarian sausage for her. This is simple to work out. But if one is on special offer, I would need to track this sort of thing so that I could recalculate for when the other is on offer. But it's like fuel and everything else.

Organisation of preps is what gives you an idea of how long your preps will actually last. Without keeping track of what you've got, you might catch yourself vastly unprepared.

So, do you record your preps? If so, how?

For us, good old pen and paper. Not because I'm a dinosaur and can't use a spreadsheet like Excel. But simply because it's handier and I don't need to load up the computer to check what we have. We have everything itemised and tallied up. Then update the tallies to a normal number on the main clipboard. HAHA, I sound well organised, but I'm not that well organised at all. Just 2 clipboards. It's through this and meal planning that I know how many days with of food we have. Also, tracking toilet paper use has allowed us to know how much toilet paper we'd need for the food we have (truth is you can never have enough toilet paper). Plus how much water we'd need for drinking, washing, and flushing (but we plan on composting more than flushing).

[Mortblanc]

I do not go to any great effort in recording the goodies.

I purchase canned goods by the flat. Each flat has 12 cans and my shelves are set up to hold 6 flat stacks. 7 stacks across the shelf, each stack containing one type fruit or veg. When I empty a flat I replace it on the next shopping trip.

Dry goods, Mac&cheese, Ramen, beans, rice, are stored in air tight containers under that shelf and replaced in the same way.

One can and one dry pack is food for one day, supplemented by canned meat and any fresh meat/greens/fruit I can forage and the eggs my chickens provide.

I suppose I use the eyeball and nod method. I look at the stacks and if all is well I nod and move along.