Coupons: What to do when....

Every week, I find that there are at least a couple of items on my grocery list that I've clipped coupons for but don't end up getting. Sometimes the stores are sold out of the item I need or the advertised item isn't actually on sale at that particular store. Whatever the reason, I often return home with coupons that I've clipped but did not need.

The first few times this happened, I just put all of the coupons into an envelope. Every week, the envelope got fatter and fatter, although I still sorted through them to see if I could use them the following week. As time goes on, it takes me longer to go through those coupons and it quickly became more than the effort was worth to go through the envelopes.

This weekend, I had a flash of inspiration (no doubt triggered by my love of Excel). I pulled out the envelopes of clipped coupons and entered them in a spreadsheet.
The columns of the spreadsheet were:
*Expiration date
*Number of coupons
*Manufacturer
*Item
*Face value
*# of items on coupon
*Amount saved per item

I sorted the spreadsheet based on expiration date. This made my grocery list process far easier yesterday. Rather than sort through the coupons to see if I could use any of them, I simply checked the list against what was on sale and what was listed at The Grocery Game.

Next week, when I get ready to make my weekly grocery list, I will pull out the coupons that I didn't use and brought back from this week's shopping trip, put the expired ones in an envelope to send overseas to the military base, delete those from my spreadsheet, log any new ones that go into the envelope, and save myself some time in the long run.

Does anyone else actually keep the coupons they don't use during their grocery shopping excursions, or do you just throw them away?