Record a purchase, an expense or a sale in seconds

Three records, one habit

Most record-keeping in reselling doesn’t fail because people don’t care. It fails at the counter. You are holding a box of linens, a handful of cash and your car keys, and the moment to write anything down passes. By Sunday night the details have gone soft, and the notebook says “estate sale, around $60?”

Sellers Almanac is built around that moment. There are three kinds of record, and each one is short.

• Purchase: money spent sourcing goods to resell. The haul from an estate sale, a bag of finds from a thrift run, a box lot at a country auction.
• Expense: money spent running the business that isn’t the cost of the goods themselves. Packing supplies, booth rent, a can of paste wax, a parking fee at the flea market.
• Sale: money a customer paid you. A dresser picked up from your driveway, a mall checkout, a Facebook Marketplace meetup paid in cash.

Every record can carry an optional note, so “the Elm Street sale, three crocks and a quilt” travels with the amount.

What each record asks for

A Purchase asks for what you spent. That’s the whole job at the moment of buying.

An Expense asks for what you spent, and offers an optional classification: materials or other. Materials are the things that go into what you sell, like paint, hardware or polish. Other covers the rest of running the business. If you’d rather not say, leave it. An unclassified expense still counts toward what you spent, and it shows plainly as Not classified rather than being quietly filed somewhere.

A Sale asks for the amount the customer paid, and the sales tax question. Sales tax is recorded exactly as you enter it. Sellers Almanac never calculates it for you, because the right amount depends on where you sold, who collected it and the rules that apply to you. What the app does do is keep that tax apart from your sales, so money that is owed onward never inflates what you took in.

A sale can also hold two optional fees: a platform or marketplace fee and a payment processing fee. They stay with the sale and show on it, but they aren’t counted in any total yet, so they don’t reduce Sales or What customers paid. Until they are, a fee you want counted in Spent, such as a mall’s commission, is recorded as an Expense instead. That’s a temporary step, not how fees will always work. Record each fee in one place, not both.

Recording at the moment it happens

The point of a short record is that you actually make it. A few habits help:

1. Record before you leave the stop. At an estate sale, record the purchase in the car before pulling out. At the thrift store, record it while the receipt is still in your hand.
2. Use the note for what you’ll forget. Where you were, what you bought, who you bought it from. The amount is easy to remember for an hour; the context is not.
3. Don’t guess. If you don’t know an amount yet, such as the tax on a sale someone else rang up, leave it. A missing amount is handled honestly (see totals that admit what’s missing).

If you’re not sure yet

A sale recorded before you know its tax never becomes a lost one: it waits in Needs attention until you have the statement or a quiet minute. Recording also works without signal, which matters in basements, barns and the back rooms of old houses. Records made offline are marked “On this phone only” until they are backed up. More on that in works without signal.

Once recorded, purchases, expenses and sales feed the totals on Home and in Money: what you spent today and this week, and what customers paid.

Where it stands

Recording purchases, expenses and sales is in founder testing on iPhone. It runs in a test build the founders use, and it is not available to download yet. The roadmap shows what’s built, what’s being built and what’s planned, and the FAQ answers the common questions plainly.