Sales

Tracking sales is a critical piece of running a studio. Being able to understand which works are no longer available, your sale prices over time, and how much you’ve earned is essential to your career.

Valise lets you record detailed sale information that’s useful for understanding your business.

Creating a sale

To create a sale, go to the Sales page and press New sale.

Fields

• Buyer: the person or institution that purchased the work. This links to your contacts. The buyer is optional, but we encourage you to record this information from your gallery or seller when possible.
• Seller: the person or institution that sold the work — usually the consignee, or yourself if it was a direct sale. This also links to your contacts.
• Date: the date the sale was made.
• Payment: whether you’ve been paid for the sale, and when. See Payment below.
• Notes: any additional context about the sale.
• Line items: one entry per artwork in the sale. Each line item lets you record the sale price for that work. Prices use your vault’s default currency, but you can change the currency per sale if needed. If you don’t know the price, you can leave it blank.
• Documents: upload any files related to the sale, such as a receipt, invoice, or sales agreement.

Adding contacts on the fly

If the buyer or seller isn’t already in your contacts, you can create them directly from the sale form without navigating away. Type their name and choose Add contact from the dropdown.

Payment

Selling a work and being paid for it are two different events, often months apart. Valise keeps track of both, so you can see at a glance which sales are still owed to you.

Every sale has a Payment setting with three possible states:

• Paid: you’ve received payment, on the date you select. The status shows the date alongside it, as “Paid · March 4, 2025”.
• Not paid: you haven’t been paid yet.
• No payment info: you haven’t recorded anything either way. This is the default for new sales, and for sales created before payment tracking existed.

We keep “No payment info” separate from “Not paid” on purpose. A sale you’ve never looked at shouldn’t claim you’re still owed money.

Recording a payment

You can set the payment status when you create a sale, or change it later from the Details section of the sale’s page.

To update several sales at once, select them from the Sales page, open the Actions menu, and choose Set payment status…. When marking a batch of sales as paid, you can choose Paid on each sale’s own sale date to stamp each one with its own date instead of picking a single date for all of them.

Connection to consignments

If the artworks in a sale were part of a consignment, Valise will reflect that in the consignment’s detail page. You can see which works from a consignment have sold by opening the consignment and switching to the Sales tab.

Tips & Tricks

• From the sale index page, you can filter sales by date to get an overview of your sales for a specific period. For example, you can filter by “2024” to see all your sales made that year to help when calculating your earnings or taxes.
• You can filter by Payment Status to pull up everything you haven’t been paid for, or by Payment Date to see what was paid in a given year. Combining the two — say, sales from 2024 that are still unpaid — is a quick way to prepare for a conversation with a gallery.