How to Track Collection Cost Basis

Record what you paid

Cost basis is the amount you paid to acquire a card or the portion of a product you assign to that card. It is a personal accounting field, not an objective market price. If a pack contains several cards, you can leave the field blank, use a simple allocation rule or record the product cost in a private note.

Keep currency explicit

PalTCG stores monetary values as minor units and records the currency. Do not convert a receipt to USD without keeping the original context somewhere private. If you trade cards rather than buy them, use a note to explain the acquisition instead of inventing a purchase price.

Separate cost from valuation

An approved market snapshot can provide context later, with confidence and freshness. It does not rewrite your cost basis and does not guarantee that you could sell at the estimate. Keeping those concepts separate makes portfolio history more honest and protects you from reading a dashboard as a promise.