See where the money went, today and this week

Two periods, two directions

The most useful money question for a reseller is rarely “how did the year go?” It’s “what did I just spend at that estate sale, and did the booth sell anything this week?” Money answers that question in two periods, Today and This week, and in two directions: what went out, and what came in.

The same totals appear on Home, so a glance at your phone between stops tells you where the week stands.

Spent, split four ways

Spent is everything you’ve recorded as going out, and it doesn’t hide inside a single number. It is split into:

• Purchases: sourcing spend, like the thrift run, the auction lot or the estate sale haul.
• Materials: expenses you’ve classified as materials, such as paint, hardware or polish.
• Other: expenses you’ve classified as other, like booth rent, packing supplies or the flea market fee.
• Not classified: expenses you haven’t classified yet.

The split matters because these are different kinds of money. A heavy sourcing week means something quite different from a week where the money went on tape, bubble wrap and a booth payment. And an expense you haven’t classified is shown as exactly that, rather than being tucked into “other” where it would look decided.

Sales, and what customers paid

On the other side sit two figures.

Sales is what customers paid you, excluding sales tax. This is the figure to watch when you want to know what your selling brought in.

What customers paid is the full amount that changed hands: your sales plus the sales tax collected. It’s the number that matches the cash in the envelope after a weekend market, or the total a buyer handed over at a Facebook Marketplace meetup.

Keeping these apart is deliberate. Sales tax collected is owed onward. Counting it as sales makes a good week look better than it was, and that kind of error is easy to make in a spreadsheet and hard to notice afterwards. Sellers Almanac records tax as you enter it; it never calculates it.

A record of what’s recorded

Every figure in Money is about what you have recorded, not about the whole business. If a purchase never made it into the app, it isn’t in Spent. If you forgot to record Saturday’s sales, they aren’t in Sales. The totals are honest about the records, and only as complete as the records are.

That is also why Money doesn’t present a profit figure. Spent this week and Sales this week are not the same goods: you might buy a dresser today and sell it in three months. Subtracting one from the other would produce a confident number that means very little. Profit depends on knowing what each item cost. Inventory items are in development, and there are no profit figures yet.

Refunds can’t be recorded yet, so no refunds are subtracted from these totals. If you correct or void a sale, the totals follow. See fix a sale without losing it.

When a figure is incomplete

Sometimes a sale is recorded before its tax amount is known. Money doesn’t treat the unknown as zero. Sales and Sales tax collected say “at least”, are marked Incomplete, and tell you why: for example, that 1 sale isn’t counted because its tax amount isn’t recorded. What customers paid stays exact. Finish the record from Needs attention and the figure becomes complete. The full reasoning is on totals that admit what’s missing.

Where it stands

Money and the Home totals are in founder testing on iPhone, in a test build the founders use. Sellers Almanac isn’t available to download yet; the roadmap shows what comes next.