The "Got?" field with its three states — absent, confirmed, and warning — tells the whole story of what separates a working checklist from a simple inventory. The warning state is for figures you've seen listed but haven't authenticated: the eBay listing that might be the UK promo variant or might be a continental release with a different base colour, and you're not sure until you look at the Code.
When the Collection Outgrows Memory
Corinthian Headliners were released across dozens of series from the early 1990s through the 2000s, with variant issues, promotional releases, regional exclusives, and repackaging runs that are genuinely difficult to track without a structured catalogue. A collector who's been at it for ten years will have somewhere between 200 and 1,000 figures, multiple variants of the same player in different kits, and a receding memory of exactly which packaging version of a specific Code they actually own.
The problem isn't quantity — it's granularity. The Ryan Giggs figure from Series 4 in the Man United red home kit with a black base and the original blister pack is a different item from the same Code reissued with a white base and poly bag packaging. If your collection tracking doesn't capture Base Colour and Packaging separately, you will at some point buy a duplicate you already have or sell a figure you thought was a spare that was actually the rarer variant.
The Architecture of a Complete Record
The Code field is the canonical identifier — the official CCC code that cross-references the Corinthian Collectors Club master list compiled by Craig Robinson. This is not a label you invent; it's the bibliographic anchor that allows your personal database to be reconciled against the community standard. A figure without a verified Code is unresolved, and the warning state on "Got?" is the appropriate status until it's confirmed.
Kit and Year together handle the variant disambiguation that makes this catalogue valuable. A player who was in multiple series — think Alan Shearer during his peak years with a new kit each season — can appear as Newcastle home 1995, Newcastle home 1996, and Newcastle away in the same year, all with different Codes but potentially identical at a glance in a display cabinet. Year tied to Kit resolves those cases unambiguously.
Base Colour deserves its own line in the collection record because it is one of the primary variant differentiators for Corinthian figures. Black bases, grey bases, white bases, and coloured bases mark specific production runs, promotional versions, and regional releases. A collector sourcing a specific rare variant at a flea market in a box of mixed figures — fishing through fifty loose heads in a biscuit tin at a car boot sale, holding each one up to the light to read the moulded code on the underside — needs to know exactly which base colour they're hunting before they start, not after.
What the Checklist Becomes at 500 Records
The Series and Packaging fields become aggregation handles at scale. Filtering by Series: "International Stars" gives you an immediate completeness view of that release set. Filtering by Packaging: "Blister" with Got?: confirmed gives you your sealed figures — the part of the collection with a different resale and insurance profile than loose.
The Collector Card field captures whether a figure came with its original card insert. For many series, the card is rarer than the figure — they were routinely discarded at the time of opening and are now the condition differentiator between a standard figure and a collector-grade example. Tracking card status per figure, rather than as a general "complete in packaging" note, gives precision that matters when assessing the collection's market value.
Notes carries the specifics that no dropdown can anticipate: whether the figure is a duplicate held for trading, whether it was sourced from a specific collector whose provenance matters, whether there's a known paint defect on an otherwise complete example. In a collection of several hundred figures across three decades of releases, the Notes field is where institutional knowledge lives.