Keeping track of sourcing spend, from estate sales to thrift runs

Why sourcing records go missing

Sourcing is the part of reselling with the most money moving and the fewest good records. Think about where you actually buy:

• Estate sales: usually cash, often a handwritten slip if anything, and frequently in a basement with no signal.
• Thrift stores: a printed receipt on thermal paper that fades to blank in the glove box.
• Auctions: a final invoice with the hammer price, the buyer’s premium and sometimes tax, emailed days later or handed over at pickup.
• Yard sales and Facebook Marketplace: cash, no receipt, a stranger’s driveway.
• Pallets and wholesale lots: an invoice, but often one total for hundreds of mixed pieces.

None of these hand you a tidy record. Unless you make one at the time, it doesn’t exist.

Purchases and expenses are different money

It’s worth keeping two kinds of spending apart from the start:

• Purchases are what you spent acquiring goods to resell. The box lot, the dresser, the bag of sweaters.
• Expenses are what you spent running the business. The tape and boxes, the booth rent, the paint for the dresser.

They behave differently. A purchase is tied to things you expect to sell; an expense is the cost of operating. Your tax preparer will usually treat them differently, so mixing them in one column creates work later. In Sellers Almanac they’re separate records, and the week’s Spent figure shows them separately.

A sourcing day, step by step

1. Before you leave, know your cash. Count what’s in your wallet. At the end of the day, the difference is a useful check against what you recorded.
2. At each stop, record the purchase before you drive off. Amount, and a note: “Maple Ave estate sale: linens, two crocks.” If there’s no signal, record it anyway; it’s marked “On this phone only” until backed up.
3. Record supplies as expenses. If you stop for packing tape or a can of finish on the way home, record it as an Expense and classify it as materials or other, or leave it Not classified.
4. Record the total you actually paid. For an auction, that’s the invoice total including the buyer’s premium, not the hammer price. Purchases can’t be edited after saving yet, so if you won’t have the invoice until pickup, note the lots now and record the purchase from the invoice.
5. Keep the paper. One envelope per month. Snap a photo of thermal receipts with your phone’s camera before they fade; Sellers Almanac doesn’t store receipt images yet.
6. At home, compare. Cash spent against purchases recorded. If they don’t match, the note on each record helps you find the gap.

What counts as a reseller expense

The common running costs for resellers include packing and shipping supplies, booth or market fees, cleaning and repair materials, price tags and labels, display fixtures and storage. Sourcing mileage is a cost too; logging it is planned, so keep a paper log for now.

Whether a given cost is deductible, and how, depends on your situation and the rules that apply to you. That’s a question for a tax professional, not for an app. What you can do is make sure every cost is recorded, with enough of a note that someone can tell what it was.

Reading your sourcing week

On Home and in Money, This week’s Spent is split into Purchases, Materials, Other and Not classified. A few uses:

• A sourcing budget. If you aim to keep sourcing to a set amount each week, Purchases tells you where you stand before Saturday’s sales.
• The unclassified share. Not classified shows how much spending you recorded without saying what it was for; classifying at the moment keeps Materials and Other meaningful.
• Honesty about gaps. These figures cover what’s recorded and backed up; anything still “On this phone only” isn’t in them yet. A purchase you forgot to record isn’t in them, which is why recording at the stop matters.

For the receipts themselves, see reseller receipt organization. For the bigger picture, see reseller bookkeeping and recording in seconds.

Sellers Almanac is in founder testing on iPhone and isn’t available to download yet.