Spreadsheet or app? An honest look for resellers

Spreadsheets are good at a lot

Let’s be fair to the spreadsheet. It’s free or close to it. It’s flexible: add a column for booth number, another for the color of the tag. It’s yours, and it opens anywhere. For a reseller who sits down every evening and enters the day’s numbers, a spreadsheet can work for years.

The question isn’t whether spreadsheets can hold resale records. It’s whether they get filled in, and whether the totals at the bottom can be trusted.

Where reseller spreadsheets break

Most of the problems aren’t with the spreadsheet itself. They’re with how and where reselling happens.

• Typing on a phone at an estate sale. Small cells, no signal, one hand holding a crock. So the entry waits until evening, and by then it’s an estimate.
• Blank cells count as zero. A sale with the tax not yet known leaves a gap, and the sum treats it as nothing. The total looks finished when it isn’t.
• Sales tax mixed into sales. One “amount” column holding what the customer paid, tax included, makes every sales figure too high.
• Edits that don’t travel. Correct a sale in the log, and last month’s summary tab, pasted as values, still shows the old figure.
• Two partners, two copies. One edits the file on a laptop, the other on a phone, and one set of changes quietly wins.
• No list of what’s unfinished. The half-entered rows are scattered across months.

What Sellers Almanac does differently

It’s designed around those breaking points. Records are made on your phone at the moment, and recording works without signal. Anything made offline is marked “On this phone only” until it’s backed up. Totals for Today and This week are worked out from the records themselves, so correcting or voiding a sale updates everything that counted it. A sale whose tax amount isn’t recorded makes Sales and Sales tax collected say “at least” and Incomplete, with the reason, rather than counting the tax as zero; see totals that admit what’s missing. Sales tax is kept apart from sales throughout. Unfinished records wait in one list, Needs attention. And if two changes to the same record clash, it asks which to keep.

What it doesn’t do is be a spreadsheet. There are no custom columns or formulas. Import and export are planned, and so are inventory items.

If you’re keeping the spreadsheet, a better template

If the spreadsheet is staying, a few rules make it far more trustworthy. One row per money event, with these columns:

1. Date
2. Type: Purchase, Expense or Sale. Keep sourcing and running costs apart from the start.
3. Description: where and what. “Maple Ave estate sale: linens.”
4. Amount: for a sale, the sale itself, excluding tax.
5. Sales tax: its own column, for sales only.
6. Expense kind: materials or other, for expenses.
7. Complete? Yes or no.

And three habits: leave a blank blank, never type a guess, and filter on “Complete? = no” once a week to finish what’s missing. When you total sales, total the Amount column only. The tax column is money owed onward.

A fair way to decide

Whatever you choose, test it against a real week. Did every purchase get recorded on the day? Can you name the records that aren’t finished? If you correct a sale, does every total change with it? Does the week’s sales figure leave tax out? If your current system passes, keep it. If it doesn’t, that’s the gap to close.

Using both

Sellers Almanac and a spreadsheet aren’t exclusive. Many people will reasonably keep a sheet for what isn’t built yet (an inventory list, or a flip log for profit per piece) while recording the money at the moment in the app. See reseller inventory management and profit on your flips.

Sellers Almanac is in founder testing on iPhone and isn’t available to download yet. There will be one price with every feature; see pricing.