Consignment Payout
The Contract CardWhat each consignor is owed, and what the shop actually kept.
A settlement is four rules stacked on each other and no two shops stack them the same way. Get the order wrong and the shop pays out a percentage of a price nobody ever paid.
The split per consignor, a price band above which they get a better share, where the card fee lands, and who bears a markdown — four rules a shop wrote into its contract, applied to a floor of items with the pennies landing somewhere real.
About this tool
Consignment Payout: what it solves
The shop’s own share is computed from what arrived, never as the other half of the split, and that is the part that goes wrong everywhere else. If a consignor is paid on the listed price and the item sold for less, the shop’s side is not a percentage — it is whatever remains of the money that actually came in, and it can be negative. A tool computing it as a percentage would print a comfortable positive figure for a sale that lost money, so this one subtracts and shows the loss. The price band is tested on what an item sold for rather than what it was tagged at, because something that only cleared the threshold on its original ticket did not clear it. An unsold item carries no sale figure at all, which is a different state from one that sold for nothing, and days on the floor are counted against the term the shop set. The pennies from an odd split go by largest remainder, using the same routine the Tip Out Calculator and the Booth Rent Calculator use, so the two halves always add back to what arrived.
The shop’s share is what is left, not a percentage
This is the thing every other consignment calculator gets wrong, and it is worth understanding before you use any of them.
If a consignor is paid on the listed price and the item sold below it, the shop’s side is not the other half of a split. It is whatever remains of the money that actually came in — and it can be less than nothing.
A tool computing the shop’s share as a percentage prints a comfortable positive figure for a sale that lost you money. Everything looks fine. It looks fine every time, on every discounted item, all year.
This subtracts instead. What arrived, minus what the consignor is owed. When that is negative it says so, on the line, in words.
The price band is tested on what it sold for
A shop with tiered splits — a better rate to the consignor above some threshold — has to decide what the threshold is tested against.
The ticket price is the tempting answer and it is the wrong one. Something tagged above the threshold and sold below it did not clear the threshold. It cleared it on paper, on a price nobody paid.
This tests the band on the sale. If you discounted it under, it is under.
Unsold is not sold for nothing
Two states that look alike in a spreadsheet and are not alike at all.
An item still on the floor has no sale figure — there is nothing to divide, nothing owed, and nothing to report except how long it has been there. An item that sold for zero is a different event and probably a mistake.
Collapsing the two puts unsold stock into your sales arithmetic as a pile of zero-value sales, which drags every average you might look at and makes a slow month look like a catastrophic one. They are held apart here.
Days on the floor are counted against the term you set, so what is past its term is a list rather than a memory.
Pennies that add back up
An odd split leaves fractions of a cent. Round each side where it falls and the two halves no longer add back to the money that came in.
The spare pennies go out by largest remainder — the same routine the tip out calculator and the booth rent calculator use — so the consignor’s side and the shop’s side always sum to exactly what arrived. Not nearly. Exactly.
Across a few items nobody would notice. Across a year of a busy floor it is the difference between books that reconcile and books that are always a few dollars out for reasons nobody can find.
What it replaces
The consignor payout done item by item at the end of the month, which is slow, and the running total in the back of a contract folder, which is slower. Or the spreadsheet that computes the shop’s side as a percentage, which is fast and quietly wrong on every discounted sale.
You set your split, your bands and your term once. Each payout run is the month’s sales.
Who it is for
Consignment shops, resale, vintage and antique malls — anywhere goods are sold for somebody else on terms you wrote, and the payout has to be defensible to the person receiving it.
What it will not do
It suggests no split and no term. What a consignor should get, and how long an item sits before it comes off, are your terms.
It does not price anything. It divides money that already arrived. It has no view on what an item was worth.
It will not show a loss as a profit. Said again because it is the whole point.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser. Consignor names and payouts stay on the machine you typed them on. Close the tab and it is gone.
Yours would be built the same way.
This one runs on made-up data. The version built for your business runs on yours, and you own it outright. Builds start at $2,500. That is a floor, not a quote. What yours costs is agreed before any work begins. The first conversation is free.