Record keeping for antique booth vendors

How booth selling actually works

A booth in an antique mall or vintage marketplace is a shop you visit, not one you stand in. Customers carry your milk-glass vase and your oak side table to the front counter and pay the mall. The mall keeps the ticket, takes its rent and commission, maybe a card fee, and pays you later with a statement covering a whole period.

Meanwhile, the work of the booth happens on your side. You source to fill the space, from estate sales and thrift runs, picked with the booth’s customers in mind. You load the car and drive in to restock, re-tag and rearrange, because a booth that never changes stops selling. You buy tags, shelf risers, lamps and a rug to make the space look like somewhere people want to linger. Some malls ask vendors to work shifts. Some vendors share a booth with a friend or partner and split the costs.

All of it is a real business. But the evidence lives in different places. The mall’s statement holds the sales and deductions, your receipts hold the costs, and your memory holds the rest.

Where the records fall apart

• Deductions you never see paid. Commission and card fees come out of the payout, so they’re easy to forget as costs.
• Rent that changes. A bigger space, a move to the front, a mall-wide increase. The number in your head may not be the one on the statement.
• Restocking buys. The things bought to fill the booth often get mixed in with everything else.
• Statements that don’t match the shelves. A sale missing from the list, a wrong price, a piece that’s simply gone.
• Sales tax handled by someone else. When the mall collects it, it’s easy to lose track of what customers actually paid compared with what you received.
• Two people, one booth. Partners buying and paying separately often count the same receipt twice, or not at all.

How Sellers Almanac helps

Sellers Almanac isn’t out yet, and it has no booth features of its own yet. But the basics already cover a booth month well in the founders’ test build:

• Booth costs as Expenses. Rent and mall charges go in as Expenses with a note naming the booth and the month.
• The mall’s commission and card fees as Expenses too, for now, one record each. Leave the sale’s own fee fields empty, so the commission is never counted twice.
• Restocking buys as Purchases, recorded at the estate sale with a note like “for the booth.”
• Statement sales at what customers paid, with the tax figure added later if the statement hasn’t arrived. Until then the totals say “at least” instead of guessing.

The full monthly routine, including how to handle commission and card fees without counting them twice, is in antique booth sales tracking. It also works without signal in the mall’s back room, and partners sharing a booth can each record from their own phone.

What’s coming

Booth features, with rent, mall sales and commission tracked together, are planned. Inventory items, so each piece carries its own cost, are in development. Android is being built.

For more on booth rent, commission and statements, browse the resources, or follow the roadmap.