Selling other people's cards

Consignment, for dealers who have to settle it later · October 2026

Look up how to track consignment and you get two kinds of answer. One is written for a clothing boutique with a point-of-sale system. The other is written for a flipper, and the method it gives you begins: log the item at a purchase price of zero.

That one instruction is where this guide starts, because it is the most expensive shortcut in consignment bookkeeping and almost nothing written for card dealers says otherwise. Consigned stock at zero cost makes every consigned sale look like pure profit, puts cards you do not own into your inventory at the wrong value, and hides money you owe until the day it leaves your hand. It also answers a question you probably did not know was open.

1. The deal has four terms, not one

Most consignment arrangements are agreed in a sentence across a table: bring them in, we will go fifty-fifty. That sentence settles one of the four things that have to be settled.

• The share — a percentage of something, or a flat amount you owe them no matter what the card goes for.
• A percentage of what — the sale price, or what is left after the costs of selling. These are different numbers, and section 2 is about how different.
• Which costs come off first, if any — platform fees, shipping, payment processing. Grading too, if you are the one sending it in.
• When you pay — on the sale, at the end of the show, monthly, or whenever they ask. The last one is not a term, it is the absence of one.

None of this needs a contract. It needs those four answers written down somewhere you will still have in three months, with the consignor's name and the date beside them. One line in a notes field is enough, and it is more than most dealers have.

2. "Fifty-fifty" is not a number yet

A consigned card sells for $100 and you agreed fifty-fifty. Two honest readings of that sentence produce two different payouts.

Say it sold online rather than at your table: a 13% final value fee and $5 of shipping, so $18 left the sale before you ever saw it.

Nine dollars, on one card, and neither row is dishonest. In the first the fees came out of your half; in the second you split them. What matters is that only one of them is what the consignor heard, and that the gap widens on every fee-heavy sale after it.

Sold for cash at your own table the two rows are identical — which is exactly why the question never comes up until the first online sale, by which point there is a specific number to disagree about and a card that has already gone.

3. What zero cost actually breaks

Three things, and the first two have nothing to do with the consignor.

• Your margin stops being your margin. Every consigned sale reports as close to 100% profit, because you recorded that the card cost you nothing. It did not cost you nothing; it cost you whatever you are about to owe.
• Your inventory holds cards you do not own. At $0 they are invisible in the value of your stock and fully present in the count of it, so both numbers are wrong at once and in opposite directions.
• What you owe is invisible until it leaves. A payout you have not made yet is not your money, but nothing in the books says so until the day you hand it over — usually in a different month from the sale that created it.

Put numbers on it. Of 120 sales across a weekend, 40 were consigned stock that took $2,000, and of that you owe $1,000. Recorded at zero cost, the weekend reports $2,000 of margin on those forty cards instead of $1,000. The report is not wrong about the cash in the box. It is wrong about whose it is, and it stays wrong until payout day, when a good weekend turns into an average one for reasons that are no longer attached to any card.

This is the same failure as a sale recorded without its costs, which the bookkeeping guide covers at the table level: a number that is too good because something real was left out of it.

4. What to write down when the cards arrive

At intake, before they go into the case — because afterwards they look exactly like yours.

The reason to do this at intake rather than at sale is physical, not clerical. A consigned PSA 9 sitting in the case beside your own PSA 9 of the same card is indistinguishable, and the moment to tell them apart is the moment one of them is in your hand and the other is not.

5. Settle per card, not per person

"I owe you $340" is a claim, not a settlement. It cannot be checked by either of you, which means it can only be believed or doubted. Those are both bad options between two people who do business repeatedly.

The reconcilable unit is the card. One line each:

• Which card, specifically enough that there is one of it.
• What it sold for.
• What the agreed basis turned that into.
• The date you paid, once you have.

Four columns, and a settlement either adds up or it does not. The consignor remembers three cards; you remember four; the list remembers which. And the list is also how you find out that one of the four has not actually sold, which is the version of this problem that nobody argues about because nobody notices it.

Worth remembering who the other party usually is. A consignor is rarely a stranger — it is another dealer, or a regular, inside a local scene of maybe thirty people who all talk to each other. A settlement nobody can verify is a reputation risk priced in cards.

6. The payout is owed the day the card sells

Not the day you pay it. This sounds like an accounting technicality and it is the difference between two readings of the same weekend.

The common way to handle a payout is to record it as an expense whenever the money actually moves. That puts the revenue in one month and the cost of it in another, so one month is better than it was and the next is worse, and neither is the truth about either. It also detaches the payout from the card, which takes you back to section 5 with no way to check anything.

The fix is small: make the payout a cost of that sale, dated to the sale, whether or not you have paid it. Then the weekend's profit is the profit, what you owe is a number you can look up before you spend it, and the cards and the obligations stay joined.

7. When consignment is not worth taking

Consignment gets recommended as free inventory. It is not free; it is inventory you rent with display space, admin and risk. Sometimes that is a good trade.

• Your share is smaller than owning. Half of a $100 card is $50 of gross for a case slot you could have filled with a card you bought at $40 and sold at $100. Consignment has to beat the alternative use of the space, not zero.
• The risk is yours in practice. If a consigned card is damaged, lost or stolen at a show, you will replace it or pay for it, whatever the arrangement said, because the alternative is losing the relationship. Price that in.
• The admin does not scale down. Intake, terms, tracking and settlement cost about the same per card whether the card is $20 or $900.

Which gives a usable rule: consignment earns its keep on cards you could not or would not have bought outright — the high-value slabs that would otherwise never be in your case. It earns very little on $20 raw singles, where the per-card admin eats the share and a good relationship gets spent on small money.

And one that is not about arithmetic: a consignor who gets a clear, checkable settlement becomes a supplier. That is worth more than the margin on any individual card, which is the actual argument for doing the four columns in section 5.

Where the software comes in

All of the above works in a notebook. Two parts of it do not scale, and those are the parts this product exists for, so here is plainly where it fits:

Clody records a consigned sale at the price it sold for and attaches the payout to that sale — as a percentage or as a flat amount, whichever you agreed. So the margin on the weekend is the real margin, and the money you owe is visible from the day the card sells rather than the day you pay it. That is sections 3 and 6, done by something that is not remembering.

It keeps the consignor side too: who you are holding cards for, what each of their cards did, what is outstanding, and settling it per card so the list in section 5 exists without you keeping it. The assistant can read it back to you at the table.

Free to start, with 14 days of Pro on the house. But the method above is the method either way — a dealer with four written terms and a line per card is ahead of one with a subscription and a handshake.

Next: the money that is at PSA — the same question as section 3 above, asked about a card that is in a box in another country.