On the phone: buying in at the booth
Buy in is the other half of the phone. It offers One card for something you are pricing individually, and A pile for everything else.
One card
Search the card catalogue — the whole catalogue, not your stock, because you do not own it yet. If you ticked Games you are taking on Set up, only those games are searched, and the box says so.
Tap the card and the sheet opens at 50% of market, with 40 / 50 / 60 / 70 / 80% buttons beside it. They are a starting point, not a rule — the keypad is there to type whatever you actually agreed. A card with no market price opens at zero and says so.
| Raw card | Pick the condition and how many |
|---|---|
| Graded slab | Certificate number, grader and grade instead |
For a slab, scan the barcode on the label or type the number — the certificate number becomes the SKU, so the slab is findable by scanning it ever after. Grader is ACE, PSA, BGS or CGC. The Label box only appears for ACE, because ACE is the only one that grades on more than one label. Quantity is fixed at one — a slab is a single object.
It joins the box straight away and can be sold the same afternoon, with the price you paid already recorded as its cost, so the profit is right when it sells.
A pile
For bulk, binder lots and anything you are not itemising. Type what the pile is worth, say what it is, and log it. It records the money leaving without pretending to know what the cards are — sort them out when you get home.
How you paid them
Recorded separately from how customers pay you. Buying in offers Cash, Trade, Bank transfer or Other — there is no card, because a card reader takes money in, it does not hand it out.
Only the cash ones move the tin. A 200.00 card bought by bank transfer does not throw your end-of-day count out.
Trade, and the cash that balances it
Choosing Trade on a pile opens Cash to balance, with You pay them and They pay you. A trade rarely comes out level, and the difference is real money in or out of the tin.
It is logged as its own cash line either way — money out is a buy, money in is an off-ledger sale — so the tin still adds up at the end of the day and the ledger shows what actually happened.
Who you bought from
The settle panel asks what kind of seller it is — Private individual unless you change it — and has an optional name and address. Nothing is required, and the phone always settles. Each settled deal gets one numbered purchase invoice for every card taken in (Reports ▸ Stock book), and the name and address go on the show's ledger export. If a card later sells through your eBay listings, they show on the eBay sales report beside what you paid.
For a VAT-registered shop on the margin scheme, HMRC expects the seller's name and address on the purchase invoice at any price, not only on big buys. A deal settled without them is marked as having no purchase record, so you and your accountant can see which sales rest on it. Cards from a seller who gave you a VAT invoice go in as standard stock, because goods bought on an invoice that shows VAT are not eligible for the scheme.
Undo on a card you bought takes back that exact purchase: the stock, its cost and its place in the margin scheme pool, and the purchase invoice is reduced or voided to match.
A pile gets a purchase invoice too, with its description and what you paid, so it appears in the Stock book beside everything else you bought. Undoing the pile voids its invoice.
A straight trade that is not level
When the cards coming in and going out are not worth the same and no cash changes hands, the deal panel shows Straight trade at, filled in with the value of what is going out. Type the figure you agreed, or leave it. Both sides are recorded at that one figure, so the cards you took in cost exactly what the cards you gave out sold for. Settling for a cash figure scales one side instead, and the pennies always add up to the figure.