Mixed-lot costing: sell before you finish counting

A storage unit, a reseller pallet, an estate lot: one price for a pile of unknown stuff. You paid $1,500. Three boxes are still taped shut. What did the jacket that sold yesterday cost?

The honest answer is nobody knows yet. A spreadsheet cannot say that; it needs a number in the cell. So most tools make you choose between guessing and waiting, and Intakes is built so that you never have to.

Guess, wait, or know when you know

Guess. $1,500 ÷ 40 items found so far = $37.50 each. Two boxes later it is 400 items and the truth was under $4. Everything you sold in between now shows a loss that never happened.

Wait. Do not list anything until the last box is counted. Honest, and it costs you weeks of selling on exactly the buys where speed matters most.

Intakes: provisional, then final. Sell now. Profit reads as a ceiling that only firms up, never a made-up number that swings — and the day you close, it becomes exact.

From the day you pay to the day you close

1. Record the buy as one purchase, at the price you paid. A storage unit for $1,500. One intake, one number, contents unknown. Open it — nothing has to be counted first.
2. Unpack in batches, adding items as you find them. Forty things today, sixty next week. Each batch is a few more lines on the same purchase, so a staged delivery or a slow unpack is still one buy and one bank transaction to reconcile.
3. List and sell while the count is still open. Anything you have added can be shelved and sold straight away. The profit on those sales is shown, and marked provisional — because the cost is not known yet, and Intakes will not guess it.
4. Close the purchase when you are done. The $1,500 — plus freight, the buyer’s premium, anything else you added — spreads fairly across everything you found. Every piece gets its real cost, including the ones you already sold, whose profit updates to the final figure.
5. Forgot a fee? Reopen, add it, reclose. Every affected cost recalculates again, and every change is on the record. The number is never frozen wrong.

What close writes

The lump sum, the freight, the auction’s buyer premium, the duty: spread fairly across everything the purchase turned out to contain, and written onto each individual piece. That is the number that follows it onto the sale, and it is what makes the profit on a $45 jacket a real figure rather than a rounded one.

• The parts always add back up to exactly what you paid.
• Damaged pieces keep their share, so a write-off is valued, not shrugged at.
• Reopen and reclose as often as the paperwork demands.

The honest answers

What does “provisional” actually mean?

That the cost has not been computed yet, because the purchase is still open. It does not mean estimated: Intakes never spreads a total over a count nobody knows yet, because that figure would be wrong by an order of magnitude in the direction that alarms. Until close, unpriced cost counts as zero, which makes the profit you see an honest ceiling that can only come down.

Does closing change reports I already looked at?

Yes, and deliberately. The profit on sales made from that purchase updates to the true figure, in the period those sales happened. The number you looked at was marked provisional; the one that replaces it is real.

What if I never finish counting?

Leave the purchase open. Sell from it, keep adding as you go, and close it when you are done — a week or a season later. Nothing is waiting on you except the final figure.

How is the price spread across the items?

By each line’s own cost where you gave one, and by weight across the whole purchase for the shared costs — freight, fees, the lump sum. A line can carry its own adjustment too, for the one crated item on a pallet. The parts always add back up to what you paid.

This is the story behind the mixed-lot buy on the resellers page. The product page shows what the finished cost looks like on a piece.