How to track card show sales
Most dealers come home from a two-day show with a cash box, a pile of receipts and a rough feeling about how it went. The feeling is usually wrong, and it is wrong in a specific direction: shows feel better than they were, because the takings are vivid and the costs are scattered.
This is what to write down while you are still at the table, and how to turn it into three numbers afterwards that tell you whether to book that show again.
In this guide
1. The five things to record per sale
A show is not the place for a bookkeeping system. You have a buyer in front of you and thirty seconds. Whatever you record has to fit in that gap, which means the list has to be short and it has to be the same every time.
Five fields are enough:
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| What | Enough to recognise it later. "Charizard ex 199/165" beats "Charizard" — you may own three. |
| How much | What actually changed hands, after any haggling. Not your asking price. |
| What it cost you | The one that makes the rest mean anything. See the next section. |
| How many | Four of the same card at $25 is not one $100 sale, and the difference matters when you reorder. |
| Which show | If you do more than two a year, a sale with no show attached is a sale you cannot learn from. |
Everything else — buyer name, time of day, payment method — is optional and most of it you will never look at. Resist adding fields. A six-field form that gets filled in is worth more than a fourteen-field form that gets abandoned by Saturday lunchtime.
Record it at the table, not at night. The single biggest source of bad card show books is the honest intention to write it all up in the hotel room. By then the forty cards have become "about forty", the $265 Charizard has become "two fifty something", and three trades have disappeared entirely.
2. Cost basis: the one everybody skips
Revenue is easy to record because somebody hands it to you. Cost is easy to skip because nobody does. So most card show records are a list of sales, which looks like a business and is actually just a list of sales.
Without what the card cost you, you do not have a margin — you have revenue with a nicer name. A $1,200 weekend on stock that cost $1,050 and a $1,200 weekend on stock that cost $400 are the same number on a sales sheet and two completely different businesses.
There are two honest ways to carry cost, and one dishonest one:
- Per card. Each card in your inventory carries what you paid. When it sells, the cost comes with it. This is the accurate way and it is only practical if your inventory is written down before the show, which is the real work.
- Per lot. You bought a collection for $800 and you are selling it off. Split the $800 across the cards by what you think each is worth — fair market value at the time you bought — and carry that split through. Not perfect, defensible, and far better than nothing.
- A percentage. "I usually pay about 60% of what I sell for." This feels like cost accounting and is actually a guess that will always agree with you. Avoid it.
If you genuinely do not know what something cost — bulk you have had for years, cards that came in a trade — leave it blank rather than guess. A blank is a known unknown you can go back to. A guess becomes a number you will later trust.
3. Trades, cash and cards
Trades are two transactions
A trade is the thing that quietly breaks card show books. You give a $200 card and take a $180 card plus $20 cash, and it goes in the notebook as "traded Charizard, +$20".
Record it as two entries: a sale at $200 and a purchase at $180. Your takings go up by $200, your stock goes up by a card that cost you $180, and the $20 is just the difference. Recorded as "+$20" you have lost a $200 sale, a $180 acquisition, and the cost basis of a card you now own and will sell later with no idea what it cost.
Cash versus card
Worth recording only if you need it for reconciliation or for tax. Most dealers do need the first: at the end of the day you count the float, and what is in the box should match the cash sales. When it does not, you have either missed a sale or made change wrong, and both are worth finding on the day.
If you take e-transfers or Square, those land in a bank account on their own schedule and will not match your show totals to the day. Record the sale on the day it happened, not the day the money arrived.
Two currencies
If you cross the border for a show, record the sale in the money it was traded in and convert once, later, at a rate you write down. A show recorded "in dollars" with some of them US and some Canadian produces a total that is not any amount of money at all, and there is no way to unpick it afterwards.
4. The costs that decide the weekend
Table fees are obvious. The rest are not, and together they usually decide whether a show was worth doing:
- Table or booth fee, including any extra for a corner or a power drop
- Travel — fuel or mileage, and the ferry or the toll if there is one
- Accommodation, split across the days if the show is more than one
- Food for however many people are behind the table
- Help — what you paid someone to work the table, even if it was cash to a friend
- Supplies consumed at the show: sleeves, toploaders, team bags, the roll of tape
- Payment fees on card and e-transfer takings
A $150 table at a show four hours away is not a $150 show. Add the fuel, a night in a hotel and two days of meals and the real floor is closer to $500 before you sell a card. That is not an argument against going — it is the number that tells you how much you had to sell to break even, which is the only way to answer "should I do this one again".
In Canada, most of these are deductible against your business income — table fees, travel, accommodation and supplies are ordinary costs of earning that income, and meals are generally deductible at 50%. Keep the receipt and record which show it belonged to; "a hotel in Richmond in October" is much harder to defend two years later than "Vancouver Card Show, October 11".
This is general information, not tax advice, and it depends on whether you are carrying on a business or disposing of personal property. Worth twenty minutes with an accountant once, early.
5. Three numbers at the end
Once the weekend is recorded, three numbers tell you almost everything:
| Number | How | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Gross margin | Takings minus what the goods cost you | Whether you are buying well. A weak margin is a buying problem, not a selling problem. |
| Net for the show | Gross margin minus the show's costs | Whether this show, specifically, is worth booking again. |
| Stock moved | Cards out, and what came in | Whether you sold inventory or just rotated it. Two shows can net the same and leave you in very different positions. |
The third one surprises people. A weekend where you cleared $600 and came home with less stock than you left with is a genuinely good weekend. A weekend where you cleared $600 by buying a collection on Sunday afternoon is a weekend where you converted cash into cardboard and will find out next time whether that was clever.
6. A template to start from
If you want to do this in a spreadsheet, here is the whole thing. Two sheets, nothing clever:
Sales — one row per sale:
| Date | Show | Item | Qty | Sold for | Cost | Currency | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-11 | Vancouver | Charizard ex 199/165 | 1 | 265.00 | 180.00 | CAD | |
| 2026-10-11 | Vancouver | Snorlax 143/159 | 2 | 30.00 | 18.00 | CAD | per unit |
Show costs — one row per cost:
| Date | Show | What | Amount | Receipt? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-10 | Vancouver | Table fee | 150.00 | y |
| 2026-10-10 | Vancouver | Fuel | 62.40 | y |
Decide whether "Sold for" and "Cost" are per unit or per line, write it at the top of the sheet, and never change your mind. Mixing the two is the single most common way a spreadsheet like this quietly stops being true, and you will not notice until the margins look strange months later.
Everything else — totals, margins, per-show summaries — is a pivot table over those two sheets. You do not need more columns. You need the eight you have, filled in every time.
7. Five mistakes worth avoiding
- Writing it up at the end of the day. It is the most common plan and the one that fails most reliably. Forty sales do not survive six hours of memory.
- Recording revenue without cost. Produces a sheet that looks like bookkeeping and cannot answer the only question you have.
- Logging trades as the difference. Loses a sale, an acquisition and a cost basis in one stroke, and the damage shows up later when you sell the card you took in.
- Not attaching sales to a show. The whole point of per-show records is deciding which shows to do again. Sales in one undifferentiated pile cannot tell you.
- Counting the table fee as the cost of the show. It is usually under a third of it.
Doing it without the spreadsheet
Everything above is the method, and the method does not need software. Plenty of dealers run it on two sheets and a shoebox of receipts and know their numbers better than people with nicer tools.
What software is for is the part the method cannot fix: the thirty seconds at the table. That is where records are actually lost — not in the arithmetic afterwards, but in the moment when typing eight fields into a phone costs you the next customer.
Clody is our answer to that. You say what you sold and it is logged against the show, the card comes off your stock, and the cost follows it through, so the three numbers above are there when you pack up instead of waiting for a Sunday night you will not spend on them. It is free to start, with 14 days of Pro on the house.
But take the method either way. A dealer with eight honest columns is ahead of one with a subscription and no cost basis.
Next: listing the cards you already have — the same stock, on Facebook Marketplace, without writing every post by hand.