Six free Excel workbooks for museums, historical societies, community theatres and galleries. No account, no email gate. Find them on the hub at volunteerbadge.com/arts-culture-toolkit or under Arts & Culture Toolkit on volunteerbadge.com/tools.
Read this before relying on the collections workbooks
Neither collections workbook can give your organisation title to anything. Whether you own an object, and what you must do before treating an unclaimed or undocumented object as yours, is decided by law — not by a status in a spreadsheet and not by how long something has sat on a shelf. More than half of US states have a museum property or unclaimed cultural property statute, those statutes set their own holding periods, notice contents, publication methods and waiting times, and some states have none at all. Take advice from an attorney familiar with your state’s law before any deaccession, disposal, transfer, insurance claim or title claim.
The six workbooks
- Accession & Deed of Gift Register — a catalogue number is not title. Cataloguing is what you did; title is what the donor did, by signing something, on a date. Every row starts at NO SIGNED DEED and will not move until both the deed date and the name of the person who signed for the donor are recorded. It also flags a restriction that was attached but never written down, and an incoming loan with no end date — which is how every old loan begins.
- Old Loan & Undocumented Custody Register — for objects lent decades ago and never collected, and objects that are simply there with no paperwork. It ships no statutory periods whatsoever. Leave the Settings numbers at zero and it computes nothing rather than offering you a claim date. Its most advanced status is still only “claim window closed — take advice before you treat this as yours”. What it is genuinely good at is the evidence trail: which objects, what was tried, when, by what method, and where the returned envelope or affidavit of publication physically lives.
- Production Rights & Royalty Tracker — two things amateur companies get wrong, put on the row rather than in a disclaimer. A performance in front of an audience is generally royalty-bearing whether or not admission is charged and however few people attend, so free previews, invited dress rehearsals, school matinees and excerpts at a gala each get a row. And you generally may not change the work — cutting lines, softening language or casting a role against the written gender typically needs the author’s prior written permission through the licensor, so every proposed change stays red until an answer arrives.
- Front of House Coverage Planner — performances down, roles across, counting only volunteers who actually confirmed. Read down a column and a role that is short on six of eleven nights reads as one recruitment problem rather than eleven scheduling ones. It ships no minimum staffing number: how many ushers a room needs is set by whoever inspects that room.
- Box Office Reconciliation Log — tickets reconcile against what was issued, separately from cash, because a house can balance to the cent and still be missing forty tickets. A row with one counter keeps saying SINGLE COUNTER even when the money was exactly right — not an accusation, but what stops any one volunteer from ever being the only person who could have.
- Artist Consignment & Payout Tracker — most US states treat consigned work, and the artist’s share of the proceeds once it sells, as property held in trust for the artist, generally beyond the reach of the gallery’s own creditors, and many expect a written agreement. So NO WRITTEN AGREEMENT outranks every other status, sold-but-unpaid is amber before it is even late, and the summary leads with the funds you are holding rather than with sales.
What arrives empty, and why
Statutory holding periods, notice requirements and claim windows; minimum front-of-house staffing; commission splits, payout terms and consignment lengths; cash variance tolerances. Each comes from a state statute, a fire marshal or building official, an insurer, or an agreement with a specific person — and they differ enormously. A figure we chose would be trusted and would be wrong somewhere, and in the collections and staffing cases being wrong is expensive or unsafe rather than merely untidy.
Two workbooks open on a warning sheet
The accession register and the old loan register both open on a READ THIS FIRST tab rather than on data. That is deliberate: both sit next to a legal question, and both would be easy to mistake for an answer to it. The tab explains what the workbook does and does not establish, before anyone types a name into it.
Disclaimers
Each download ends with a Terms & Disclaimer tab. VolunteerBadge and ScreenForge Labs, LLC are not affiliated with the American Alliance of Museums, the American Association for State and Local History, Concord Theatricals, Music Theatre International, Dramatists Play Service, the Dramatists Guild, any performing rights organisation, or any author, estate or licensor. Nothing in these workbooks is legal, accounting, insurance or tax advice; none of them is a licence or evidence that you hold one; and a status in any of them reflects only what has been typed into it.
Format
Every workbook is a branded .xlsx with live formulas and works in Excel, Google Sheets (upload to Drive and open with Sheets), Numbers and LibreOffice. There are deliberately no array formulas anywhere in the set. The front of house coverage grid is wide by design — open that one on a laptop rather than a phone, since seeing every performance and every role at once is the whole point of it.