My wife and I started to coupon a little over a year ago. In that time we have saved in excess of $1,000 on groceries alone. If you count clothes, toiletries, pet supplies, and food from restaurants we’ve saved much more than $1,000, and that’s just shopping for two people.
One problem we ran into as we got more serious about couponing is the fact that the more coupons you have the harder it is to manage and organize them.
Obviously everyone wants to save the most money with as little time or effort as possible. That’s why coupons can be effective for advertisers; very few will take the time to learn how to maximize savings by using them.
Our solution was creating a database so we could easily sort through the coupons we have and discard those that have gone out of date.
Step One: Cut out all your coupons
Step Two: Enter all your coupons into the database
Entering the coupons goes relatively quickly once you get the hang of it. The following data needs to be populated for each coupon:
- Expiration Date
- Brand
- Type
- Description
- Savings
- Manufacturer or Store
- Quantity
Once this data is entered, the envelope location column will automatically populate. If it doesn’t drag down the formulas. This has to do with how the physical coupons are sorted. Below is an example of the database once populated (click image for full-size image):
Step Three: Once you enter all the coupons, sort them in envelopes that have expiration dates spanning a given week. For example, you would have an envelope that holds all your coupons that expire 11/26/2017 – 12/2/2017, 12/3/2017 – 12/9/2017, and so on.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully sorted all your coupons using an Excel database!
Step Four: Find specific coupons to use
If you need cheese, all you have to do is filter on the “Type” heading for cheese. This will bring up all the coupons you have for cheese, including the details of the coupon.
As you can see below, the only coupons in our database being displayed are coupons for cheese:
As you may know, some stores let you use both a manufacturer and store coupon on products. Target is one of those stores. If you filter on Purina for brand, you can see there is a manufacturer and Target coupon. Unfortunately in the below case these coupons are for separate products.
Obviously the biggest advantage of this database system is being able to filter the data and find specific coupons quickly and efficiently that you are going to use on your next shopping trip. If you are new to Excel, or simply don’t use it that often, the filter option is found under the “Data” grouping on the ribbon:
Final Step: Once you’ve identified the coupons you are going to use, all you have to do is retrieve them from the various envelopes they are stored in. While this may require some manual sifting through coupons, the number you have to search through is greatly reduced from splitting them up into one-week expiration periods.
Don’t forget to delete coupons out of the database once you’ve removed them from their envelopes!
An additional benefit of the database is that it’s easy to trash expired coupons. Let’s say an envelope houses coupons that expire from 8/5/2012 – 8/11/2012. On August 12th you can simply trash all the coupons in this envelope and delete them from your database. Filtering on “Expiration Date” from oldest to newest will allow you to easily delete the rows of expired coupons.
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I hope this strategy of organizing coupons with a database in Excel saves you a ton of time and money!
If you have any questions or suggestions for upgrades, please leave them in the comments!
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Great tips, it looks like to are a bit of an excel whiz DC. I often have to ask my wife for help in excel as I almost never use it other than for making graphs.
MonsterPiggyBank Ironically charts/graphs are my weak spot in Excel! I’m going through a book called “Charts and Dashboards in Excel 2010” to get better at it.
These are some great tips DC! The excel geek in me would love doing something like this, though I fear my wife would not have the same joy in doing it. ;)
FrugalRules Haha well my wife does not use Excel as much as me, but I get everything entered and she can easily sort and find what she’s looking for – saves her hours upon hours when she makes our grocery lists.
Kind of makes my coupons is a dirty old envelope look pretty sad. I wish I was more organized in that respect.
Eyesonthedollar LOL at your description of a “dirty old envelope!” Even if you organize them using Excel, you still need somewhere to store those coupons ;)
I currently have my coupons in a plastic baggie in my purse. Not too organized! Maybe I will have to try your method =)
Holly at ClubThrifty If you want to get serious about it, do it!
Excellent job DC!! I downloaded it. I can just imagine how long it took for you to initially put it together. And Congrats on saving so much money on your groceries and such. I’ve tried using coupons in our city but I find that most of them are for 50 cents and the products are at stores that I don’t normally go to so for the 50 cents I save I spent that in gas to get there. Target just opened in our city a few months ago. I haven’t been yet, but everyone says that it is not the same as the US version, just like Walmart here, is not the same as in the US. So we’ll have to see how they accept coupons here.
PS. If we are guessing who you new writer is, I have my guess… :-)
TacklingOurDebt Aw that’s too bad that Target is different in Canada. Honestly we save tons and tons of money from shopping at Target because we get 5% off every purchase from using a Target debit card (linked to our bank account), plus you get 5% off an entire day’s purchase if you fill 5 prescriptions, PLUS you can stack Target and manufacturer coupons…and Target.com always has a ton of coupons you can print out.
Yes my new writer is someone who quite a few will be familiar with : )
Holy cow that’s incredibly organized! I’m like Holly in that I just put coupons in an envelope. I mostly use them for beauty products because I find that most coupons are for things I never buy.
Beachbudget Yes it’s pointless to cut out or print out coupons for stuff you never buy. Thankfully we have found coupons for MOST things we buy, of course there are always some things where coupons are rarer, such as fresh produce. We get that at a discount at Aldi.
Really need to start using coupons….
ayoungpro Shame on you for not using them! Just kidding, I actually rarely used them before getting married. Now we are pretty hardcore about it since we are looking to cut our expenses as much as we can.
The nerd in me is incredibly impressed by your excel spreadsheet and the amount of money you saved! I am hit or mess with using physical coupons. Really good when I purchase online to do a quick search for free shipping code or discount code. Maybe this will help! :)
TheHeavyPurse Online shopping has definitely become very easy to score discounts. There are whole websites dedicated to finding online coupon codes! We are pretty hardcore about saving money with coupons since we are paying down student loans, saving money, etc. Usually try to cut out all the coupons from the inserts on the weekend plus print out some from Target.com, coupons.com, etc. Pretty easy to get a ton quick.
Wow, I don’t think I’d ever make it to a coupon database with all the coupons we have here. We don’t use them like we used to though but organizing them in the binder with dividers serves our purpose well. Like you we saved thousands but have since cut back as we don’t stockpile as much. We just go through the binder once a month and discard expired coupons. It’s simple enough for us and we already know what we have because we put them in there. When we want to pick out coupons we use baseball card pages from the dollar store in the binder so all the coupons are neat and in it’s place. We pull out what we want if we don’t want to take the binder. How long does it take you each week to enter all your coupons? Thanks for sharing this, I’m sure many will enjoy the organization of it in the spreadsheet and will be thrilled to find this. Cheers
CanadianBudgetB Hmmm I enter probably 100-150 a week, and it takes me an hour or less. I’ve got it down to a science, tho ; ) It REALLY helps us not buy things we don’t need because you don’t look at the coupon besides when you enter it and when you take it out to use it. Filtering on the “type” of coupon, i.e. Peanut Butter or Bread helps us make sure we never pay full price for anything.
CommonCentsWealth Great job, Jake.
Like TheHeavPurse I am so impressed! I am no much of a couponer but am a regular contest enterer – always having to plow though my Twitter follows to unfollow ones that aren’t useful to me anymore. A tool to manage that easier would be awesome – I’d probably PAY for it!
MD Kennedy Check out Tweepi, and please don’t unfollow us! : P
Ahh, I love excel. It makes the world go ’round. Good system :-) I also had the question about time-spent, but I see you answered it for Mr. CBB
Ugifter I definitely do not guarantee that everyone can enter them as quickly as I can (and I’m sure some can do it even faster!) but the time spent entering them is saved when my wife makes her list, and we always get the absolute best deal because of the filtering option.
caralynerickson Thanks Cara!
I’ve never been good at couponing, mostly because the organization is daunting. Perhaps I’ll try your spreadsheet method!
brokeandbeau It’s the best system I’ve found so far, hopefully you find it useful!
Wow! This is exactly what I was looking for. I added a few other columns to modify it to the coupon organization me and my bff use. I’m a little late in the game here, I am a newbie to couponing and my I’m learning the ropes from my bff who is a veteran couponer.
Much appreciation for you and your work. I am very grateful I came across this!
artsysusie I’m glad you found it useful! I also appreciate you dropping a note. I always appreciate people letting me know that they found the spreadsheet useful – it motivates me to continue to update it and make it better.
Thanks much for sharing this database! I purchase the Sunday paper for coupon inserts and was just putting them in a folder by month and then would have to go thru the inserts every time I went shopping! I use Ibotta and various other savings apps and have added that column to the spreadsheet to show even more savings. This past week, it took me almost two hours to go thru the savings apps and matching coupons – this database is going to cut my time in half if not more! I saved $51.90 between coupons and app rebates! Again, thanks much, you have made couponing a breeze!
Thanks Gina! I’m so glad you found value in the database! Don’t hesitate sharing with others ; )