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On the physical side of organizing stocks on components...

I've been reorganizing my parts storage for components and spare pcb's
by buying two office filing cabinets with hanging file folders. One
folder per mfg part #, arranged alphabetically. The parts just get
dropped in, usually in the trays they come in, sometimes (for stuff I
got as samples) after being pushed into anti-static foam. Most of the
time for the labels I just cut out the labels Digikey puts on them. I've
currently got two pull out drawers with about 100 parts each for general
items, a third drawer with just over 20 folders dedicated to PIC chips
and a fourth with PCB's and more traditional receipts/invoices and the
like.

Been using this for the past few weeks now. It's really easy to find
parts, assumming you know what you are looking for. If you don't the
digikey labels have a decent amount of info on them so it's not so bad
to search manually. I also find that like parts end up together, simply
due to similar part numbers. Adding new parts is similarly easy, grab an
unused folder, put a label on it and plop it into place. No need to move
anything to keep it ordered like with those pull out drawer units.

I don't plan to make any sort of master inventory. I'm guessing that
since the only user is me if I want to know how much stuff I have it'd
be less work to just open the drawers and look, rather than trying to
keep anything up to date. For pricing if I'm using something from my
stocks good accounting would say that I should be pricing based on it's
replacement cost, not what I bought it for. So go off to digikey, do up
an order sheet and see what it says. Besides in general, I don't keep
big inventories of valuable stuff, the only exception being DS3231's and
DS32khz's which have a long lead time and some PIC chips where I've
standardized on a small number of types, and there is a large price
difference between singles and buying 25. Even then I'd rather stay away
from that as stocks tie up a lot of capital, and are a downright waste
if the parts become obselete. I've got a bunch of SOIC 16lf819's for
instance that I'm regretting buying.

The main thing I don't like about the setup is that the depth of a
standard letter sized file folder is far more than nearly every part I
have in them. I could easilly halve that depth and be happy. I've got
the occasional deeper part, like large leds and lcd's, but they could
easilly go in their own drawer. Making custom shallow file folders would
be pretty easy, just cut 'em short and staple the bottoms, but getting
drawers for it would be more involved. Kitchen cabinet stuff or cheap
clothes drawers might work if I fabricate hanging rails for it, though
ironically right now my clothes drawer in my apartment is a office
filing cabinet.

- -- 
http://petertodd.org
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