Do I need to track the cert number if I already have the slab in hand?

Yes. A cert number lets a buyer verify the grade against the grader's own database before they pay, and it's your proof of ownership if a slab is ever lost, damaged in transit, or disputed. It takes seconds to log and saves a real headache later.

Should grading fees go into the card's cost basis or get tracked separately?

Both, in a sense: record the grading fee as its own line so you can see what grading cost you, but add it to the card's total cost basis so the slab's eventual sale price is measured against what you actually have into it, not just the pre-grading purchase price.

What if a card comes back from grading at a lower grade than expected?

Update the grade field and keep the raw and grading cost lines as they are. The cost didn't change, only the realistic resale value did, and keeping the costs separate from the grade makes that easy to see rather than something you have to reconstruct later.

Is a slab's market value tracked the same way as a raw card's?

It should be searchable the same way, but priced from its own comps; a slab's market is its own grader-and-grade market, not a multiple of the raw card's price. See a card's market value by set and condition inside CardOps so a slab's price reflects what that exact grade is actually selling for.

How to Track Graded Slabs in Your Inventory

A raw card and a slab are not the same line item. A slab carries a grader, a grade, a cert number, and usually a different cost basis than the card did before it went in the case. Track it like a raw card and you lose the details that actually make it worth more.

Most vendors start logging graded stock the same way they log everything else: name, set, price. That works until a buyer asks for the cert number, or you cannot remember whether the PSA 9 in the case is the one you paid two hundred for or the one you paid sixty for before it came back from grading. Slabs need a few more fields than a raw card, and once you have them, pricing and searching a slab at the table gets just as fast as pricing a raw one.

What a slab record needs that a raw card doesn't

A raw card's record is mostly card identity and condition language. A slab replaces "condition language" with four facts that buyers and your own books both care about:

Grader. PSA, CGC, BGS, and others are not interchangeable. The same numeric grade from different graders does not carry the same market value, and serious buyers know it.
Grade. The number on the label, recorded as its own field, not folded into a notes line you have to re-read every time.
Cert number. The unique number on the slab that a buyer can look up against the grader's own database. Recording it is also what lets you prove a slab is yours if one is ever lost or disputed.
Cost basis for the slab, not the raw card. What you actually have into it is the card's cost plus the grading fee, the shipping both ways, and anything you paid a middleman. That total, not the price tag you remember from before it went in for grading, is what your margin should be measured against.

Leave any one of those off and the record can still identify the card, but it can't answer the questions a buyer or your own year-end numbers will actually ask.

Keep the raw cost and the grading cost as separate lines

A slab's cost basis is really two purchases: the card, and the grading. Mixing them into one number makes it hard to tell later whether a slab was profitable because the card was cheap or because the grade came back high.

Record them as two figures that sum to the slab's total cost:

Raw cost. What you paid for the card before submission, or your best-documented estimate if it came from a bulk lot.
Grading cost. The grader's fee, plus return shipping, plus any submission service fee, for that specific card.

Keeping these separate also matters if a card comes back lower than expected. A card bought as a likely PSA 9 that comes back a 7 is still worth tracking honestly: the raw cost didn't change, only the realistic resale value did. A combined cost figure hides that; two separate lines show it plainly.

Price a slab by its own comps, not the raw card's comps

A PSA 10 and a raw near-mint copy of the same card are different markets. The multiple between them is not fixed: it moves with how scarce a gem copy is, how recently the population report updated, and how hot the card is at the moment. Pricing a slab off a raw comp, adjusted by a rule of thumb, will be wrong in both directions depending on the card.

When you price a slab for sale, pull comps for that exact card at that exact grader and grade. If you don't have a clean comp, the next best anchor is a slightly lower grade from the same grader, adjusted up, not a raw price multiplied by a guess.

This is also why the grader and grade need to be their own searchable fields rather than text in a title. At a table, you don't have time to re-derive a card's grade from a description; you need to filter straight to "PSA 10, this set" and see what's in the case.

Make a slab searchable the same way a raw card is

The point of all these extra fields is not paperwork for its own sake. It's so that at a show, a slab is exactly as fast to find, price, and sell as a raw card is. If grader and grade live in a notes field instead of structured data, you can't search or filter by them, and every slab sale starts with you squinting at a label.

In CardOps, a card's grade and grading details are part of its record, not a separate note you have to remember to check, so a slab shows up in a search and carries its market value the same way a raw card does. Show Mode runs the lookup and the sale from the same screen, and keeps working if the hall has no signal, which matters as much for a four-figure slab as it does for a dollar common.

Decide what counts as a sale versus a return from grading

One more distinction worth recording cleanly: when a card goes out for grading and comes back, that is not a sale and not a new purchase. It's the same inventory item changing state, from raw to graded, with the grading fee added to its cost. If your records treat a card leaving for grading as a sale and the slab coming back as a fresh buy, your sales totals and your actual profit will both be off, even though no money changed hands with a customer either time.

The simplest fix is to log a grading submission as a cost added to an existing item, not as two separate transactions. The card's history then reads cleanly: bought raw, submitted, graded, cost basis updated, later sold as a slab. Anyone looking at the record, including you at tax time, can follow exactly what happened and what it actually cost to get there.