Consignment tracking for ceramic studios
A broken piece is neither a sale nor stock. How to keep the count when what you leave behind can shatter on the shelf.
Worth knowing: the app schedules visits weekly, fortnightly or monthly, and nothing slower. The arithmetic is unaffected — it is the same subtraction — but the round will flag a shop before it is genuinely due. If your trade moves at this pace, better to know that before signing up than after.
Consignment dominates in ceramics because every piece is different and no shop buys outright what it cannot be sure will turn over. Breakage is part of the deal, and worth putting in writing before the first crate is left.
The sum, in your numbers
- On the shelf last visit
- 20
- Still there today
- 12
- Sold
- 8
- Price per piece
- MX$380
- Owed
- MX$3,040
Ceramics carry a line item no other trade on this list has, and it is the one that causes the most arguments: the piece that broke.
Neither a sale nor stock
When you arrive and there are nineteen of the twenty pieces you left, and the missing one is in the bin out the back, that piece is not a sale and is no longer stock. Count it as sold and you are billing the shop for something nobody bought. Leave it in stock and your count is wrong from then on.
1 of 20
in the bin out the back
Not a sale, not stock, and not something an app can arbitrate. What it can do is write down that it happened, with a date.
It is recorded as a write-off: it leaves the shop’s stock, raises no charge and raises no commission. Who absorbs the loss is an agreement between people and the app stays out of it — but at least it is written down, with a date, which is what you need when the conversation comes round again in March.
One-off pieces against production lines
Nearly every studio runs both. Mugs and plates from a production line are counted by quantity like any other product. A one-off is not counted, it is identified: it is either there or it is not, and if it is not, it sold at its own price.
Carrying each one-off as its own product sounds excessive until the first time somebody asks what they owe and you have to remember which vase it was.
December
For most of the year a craft shop restocks from you every two or three months. In November and December it can be weekly. That is where a notebook fails hardest, because it is many visits close together to the same shops and they all look alike.
On rhythm, the honest warning: the calendar schedules weekly, fortnightly or monthly and nothing slower. In season that suits you exactly. In February, when every three months is the truth, it will flag the shop early.
Common questions
- Does the app decide who pays for a broken piece?
- No, and it should not. Breakage is recorded as a write-off and leaves stock. Who absorbs it is your agreement with the shop, and no app can negotiate that for you.
- Does it cope with December, when everything moves at triple speed?
- That is when it earns its keep. In high season you may visit the same shop three times in a month, and each visit counts what was left from the last.