An application that knows what you owe each consignor

Stock that is not yours

This is the fact everything else follows from, and it is the one an ordinary stock system cannot represent. Purchased stock has one owner: you. A consignment floor has as many owners as it has consignors, and each item stays someone's property until it sells. The consequence is that a stock valuation no longer means anything: what matters is not what the floor is worth, it is what you will owe once it has sold.

The question you must be able to answer at any moment is therefore twofold, and a notebook does not answer it: how much do I owe this person, and which of their items are still unsold? The first half can be painfully reconstructed at month end; the second cannot be reconstructed at all once the floor runs to a few hundred items.

The item has a cycle, not a level

A consigned item moves through states, and that succession is the trade: it is taken in under an agreement, put on the floor at an agreed price, possibly marked down after a delay, then it leaves — sold, returned to its consignor, or abandoned depending on what the agreement provides. You do not reorder: you receive what is brought to you.

The consignment agreement carries the one piece of data nothing else carries: its TERM. That is what creates the deadline — the date on which an unsold item must be collected, marked down or reassigned. Without it, unsold items pile up quietly and take up space nobody decided to give them; with it, the application can say every morning what falls due this week.

• Consignors: contact details, identity recorded, payout details
• Consignment agreements: date, term, commission rate, what happens to unsold items
• Items: description, price, condition, date placed on the floor, markdown if any
• Sales: item, date, price actually taken
• Payouts: consignor, period, amount paid

Your revenue is the commission, not the sale

A consignment shop that reads its activity off the amount taken is using the wrong quantity: most of that sum belongs to somebody else. The figure that actually describes the business is the commission retained, and it cannot be read off a till total — it is worked out item by item, because the rate may depend on the agreement, the category of goods or the price.

The counterpart is the payout. A sale settles nothing: it creates a debt to the consignor, which is discharged on the day you pay. Holding the two separately — what is owed, what has been paid — is what lets you tell someone at the counter where their account stands, without redoing the arithmetic in front of them.

How the application is produced

You describe what your shop does, in your own words — «consignor», «intake», «markdown», «return», «payout». A plan is shown to you before anything is built: the entities kept, their fields, the screens, the indicators. You correct it until it matches how you actually work; nothing is built before you approve it.

The result is a standard Next.js and Prisma project. You can download it as a ZIP archive or push it to GitHub: the code is yours, and any developer can pick it up. Three generation levels exist (Sketch, Craft, Masterpiece), depending on whether you are testing an idea or want a finished application.

What the application is NOT — and one regulatory point

This page describes an internal tracking tool. Several needs of a consignment shop fall outside what the product does, and it is better to know before you start than after. The first point is not a technical limit but a legal obligation, and it is worth reading in full:

In France, article 321-7 of the Criminal Code requires any professional activity involving the sale or exchange of used movable goods — consignment is named explicitly — to keep a daily register describing the objects and identifying the people who brought them in. That register must be numbered and initialled before opening by the police commissioner or the mayor. A generated application is NOT that register and does not replace it: it can hold the same information as management data, which gives it no regulatory standing. Check with your local authority what your activity is subject to; rules differ by country.

None of the limits below is permanent as far as the code goes — the project is exportable and a developer can extend it — but none is provided out of the box.

• It is not certified point-of-sale software: if your shop is subject to that requirement, payments must stay on your existing till system.
• No connection to a card terminal, barcode scanner or label printer.
• No payments out: the application works out and tracks what is owed to each consignor, it triggers no bank transfer.
• No consignment agreement is generated: the document signed with the consignor stays yours, the application records its terms.
• No online shop and no listing on a marketplace.
• No offline mode, and permissions are global (administrator, user, read-only).

Getting your data out

The data you enter stays yours and can be retrieved from the Settings screen, as JSON or CSV, one dataset at a time. That is the format that helps at year end or in a meeting with your accountant: a CSV opens in a spreadsheet, sorts by consignor, and can be cross-checked against takings.

Lists can be filtered and sorted, and a trash bin lets you restore a row deleted by mistake — useful when several people take in consignments at the counter.