On the phone: selling at the booth
What your staff see on a connected phone. Worth reading before you leave — the phone has no help panel of its own.
The top of the screen always says which show it is, which phone this is, and whether a card reader is attached or not. Underneath, Sell out and Buy in switch between the two jobs.
Finding the card
Search box, or the scan button next to it for the camera — a printed SKU label scans straight to the item. Only what is in the box is searched; the shop's shelves are not on this phone. Each tile shows the picture, how many are left, the condition, language and set, the price the website was asking and the market price.
The price is the point
Tap a tile and the sheet opens at the website price, ready to be typed over — start typing on the keypad and it replaces, it does not append. At a show you haggle, so there is no "sell at the listed price" shortcut.
If the item has a recorded cost, the sheet shows your bottom line as you type: the profit left after what you paid, and after the card fee if they are paying by card. Sell below what you paid and it turns red and says Loss — nobody has to do the sum in their head across a table.
Giving something away is a sale at 0.00. Log it, so the card leaves the ledger rather than coming home as stock you do not have. The ledger export marks it Gift in the Given away column, with what the card cost you, so you and your accountant can check it against HMRC's business-gift rules.
With no signal
A sale made while the phone has no signal is kept on the phone and sent when the signal comes back. It is recorded at the time it was made, not the time it arrived, so a sale at 23:50 on the last day of a VAT period stays in that period. If the card was no longer at the show by then, the sale is still recorded against its cost, and the ledger asks you to check the count.
Paying
Cash, Card, Trade or Other. With a reader attached, Charge the card sends the amount to it and the phone waits — ask them to tap. If the reader is being awkward, They paid another way — mark as paid records the sale anyway, and Stop the payment cancels it with nothing recorded. Without a reader there is no waiting: take it on your own machine, then press the button.
Several cards, one payment
The + on a tile adds it to a basket instead of selling it on its own; the basket icon at the top counts the lines. Open it to set the agreed price on each line, take one payment for the total, and log every card in one go. Empty it throws the basket away without selling anything.
The menu
The button top right opens the drawer. It has three tabs:
| Deals | Opens first. To sticker lists every card bought in on a settled deal that is still waiting for a sticker, with its picture and the price to write on it; tap the price to change it (that becomes the card's price, on the website too), tap the tick when the card is stickered and out on the table. The first tick asks which binder, case or box the card is going in and remembers the answer, so the card is filed in the next free pocket as you tick it. All deals shows each deal whole — what came in, what went out, and the cash either way — and lets you untick a card. |
|---|---|
| Bulk sale | The £1 binders — records the money and touches no stock |
| Stats | How the day has gone by the hour — sold, bought in and profit as bars, and a line for the stock value taken in: what the cards you bought or traded in are priced to sell at, running up through the day. Buy-ins on paper is that value less what you gave for them, and Profit incl. buy-ins adds it to the real profit — on paper, because those cards still have to sell; a card with no price yet counts at nothing and is counted as unpriced. Count the tin under Cash you should hold records what is actually in the tin against what the till expects. Then the running total (taken, spent buying in, cash expected, items sold, still in the box) and Just happened — the last 20 entries with an undo arrow on each |
Ticks are shared: any phone on the show sees what has been stickered, so whoever gets a quiet minute can work through the list.
Every tile carries where the card is — Binder 2 · p.6 · 3 — and tapping that opens the page with the card picked out, so a helper who did not pack the box can still find it.
Undo puts the card back in the box and takes the money back off the totals. It is for the mis-tap you notice immediately. A sale that has already been posted to your books cannot be undone here — the phone says so rather than quietly failing.
Bulk sales still count towards the day's takings and towards your plan allowance. They just have no stock behind them, which is what makes the cash total add up when half the table is loose commons.