Holds and sales record the commercial life of a work in WrkLst — from reserving a piece for a client, through turning that reservation into a sale, to the invoice and the payments on it. This article describes WrkLst 10.
Before you start
You need a work in your inventory and a contact for the client. See Creating New Artwork and Create a New Contact.
Place a hold on a work
Open the action menu on the work you want to reserve. Alongside Offer, Interest, Sell, Ship, Exhibit, Consign and Present, you will find Hold.
The action menu of a work: 1 Interest · 2 Hold · 3 Sell · 4 Present
The hold dialog: 1 Put on hold
- Choose Hold. A dialog opens for that inventory number.
- Set how long the hold runs: Until a date with an hour and minute, or For a duration in minutes, hours or days. A two-hour reservation at a fair works the same way as a hold that runs for weeks, and a timed hold expires on its own.
- Choose the Client and add Notes your colleagues will see, then press Put on hold.
The work is marked as held in the inventory, so anyone browsing available works can tell at a glance that it is spoken for. Hold in the sale form opens the full sale form instead, where a hold can also be Indefinite. You can also pick several works in the basket and choose Hold, Sell or Offer: the new record opens with those works already on it, with prices, captions and sizes filled in.
Edit, release or convert a hold
The action menu changes once a work is on hold:
- Edit hold — change the deadline, the client or the notes.
- Release hold — return the work to available without recording a transaction. Use this when a client passes.
- Hold to sale — carry the reservation straight through into a sale. Set the Sale date and the Payment status and press Promote to sale; the work and the client are already filled in.
Record the sale
A sale records who bought what, when, and on what terms. You set the Type — Offer, Hold, Sale, Donation, Gift or Cancelled — the Sale Date and the Facilitator, the colleague responsible for the deal. Executed through says whether the sale was made in-house, by an external seller or by an external gallery; the options Museum sale, Through auction and Confidential describe the shape of the transaction. Under Parties you choose the Client and, where they apply, the Consultant, Museum, Curator and Bill To contact. If you run more than one space, the sale also says which Location it belongs to.
A sale, with its bar at the bottom: 1 Edit sale · 2 Invoice · 3 Share as
For each work you record the Price and Currency, any Discount as a percentage or a fixed amount, Additional Costs with your own label for things such as framing, and the Tax rate and label. The Item Text on your paperwork is pre-filled from the work record and can be edited for that sale. Shipping is billed on the same invoice under Bill Shipments, anything else under Other Items.
The invoice is laid out line by line, with every discount, tax and currency conversion shown, and the outstanding amount at the top — so you can see whether a sale is paid without opening the PDF. The pictures at the top of the sale open the artwork full screen with its whole caption.
Payments and payment links
On a sold work the action menu offers Record payment: set the Payment status — Paid in full, Payments pending or Not paid — the Last payment date and Payment notes, and press Save payment. Money that arrives on your bank account or through Stripe, Shopify or QuickBooks is matched to the sale under Sales → Payments; see Payments.
In the sale form you can Provide credit card payment link via Stripe or via Shopify, optionally with a credit card fee, or let the client pay the invoice in QuickBooks. The Payment link on the sale is for your client — do not open it yourself. When a sale goes to QuickBooks you can pick the Income account it posts to, so a primary sale and a resale need not land in the same place.
After the sale
Because sales are linked to both works and contacts, the transaction appears on the work's record and on the client's contact record. The Sales list shows sales as cards or as a table, sorted by client, invoice number or date, and filtered by type, payment status, year, facilitator or the location of the works. Searching matches the titles of the artworks on a sale as well as their inventory numbers, the artist, the client and the invoice number.
The sales list: 1 Search sales · 2 Filter · 3 Show as table · 4 Add sale
Invoices and paperwork
Choose Share as on a sale, pick a template and the PDF or Word document downloads on your own letterhead; see Document templates: PDFs, Word and Excel on your own letterhead. If your bookkeeping needs numbered, locked invoices, e-invoices or a DATEV export, see Invoices: numbered invoices, e-invoices and DATEV export.
Still using WrkLst Classic? This topic in the Classic documentation: Holds & Sales