CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

You can easily create custom activity types for purchases and museum visits. Past activities can be imported via Import Activities (but you'll first have to import / create the contact records).

CiviCRM will store the data needed to answer questions like the 2 you've posed. However, the built-in Advanced Search and Search Builder functions might not return the "answers" in the way you want. You should explore those on the public demo, and then look at an example of a custom search that was built / contributed by a community member which returns activities by date, type, etc.

http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/contact/search/custom?reset=1&csid=8

Note that once you've got a custom search with the input criteria and output columns you need - you can export to spreadsheets, trigger mailings etc. from that search.