For makers who sell at fairs
BoothInventory rides in your apron pocket at the table and opens on the laptop at the studio bench. Count in at load in, count out at load out, and the whole show adds itself up while you are still folding the linens.
What the bins never tell you
Every maker who works a circuit knows the two conversations on the drive home. The first is about which table neighbor had the good coffee. The second is the one nobody wants: did that show actually pay, and what do I have left in the bins.
You load six totes at 5 a.m. and unload five and a half at nine that night. Somewhere between the tent and the truck the count became a guess, and the guess follows you into the next show.
One miscounted run of 40 stud earrings is roughly $560 of finished stock you cannot find.
It was good in 2022, so it stays on the calendar. Nobody adds the jury fee, the booth fee, two tanks of gas, a motel night and eleven hours behind the wheel before deciding it was good again.
A $425 booth plus 9 hours of drive time can net less than a quiet Saturday at the bench.
The small planters go by eleven on Saturday. You tell yourself you will remember. By Tuesday you are wedging clay for the wrong thing and the same shelf empties again at the next market.
Selling out of one fast line before noon leaves about $310 sitting on the table.
Fourteen markets, three card readers, cash in a zip pouch and a fee schedule for four different counties. Rebuilding a season from bank exports is the least creative week of the year.
Makers we surveyed spend 6 to 9 hours reconstructing one season for their tax preparer.
Four passes, one show
The whole method fits between two cups of coffee. Nothing here asks you to price differently, sell differently or stop talking to the person at your table.
Enter your lines the way you actually make them: form, glaze, colorway, size run. Each one carries a price, a material cost and a batch size. You do this once, in the studio, and it carries into every show for the rest of the year.
As the risers go on the table, tap the count for each line. Two people can count the same booth from two phones and the totals merge by line item. It takes about four minutes for a hundred piece booth, and it works with the signal off.
Tap sales as they happen, or leave the phone in the apron and import the card reader batch after the show. Cash, card, trade with the booth across the aisle and custom orders all land in the same show record with the right price attached.
At load out you count what is going home. The difference is your sold list, checked against the money you took. Booth fee, mileage, lodging and helper pay go in the same screen, and the show scorecard is finished before the tent is folded.
Built for the tent, not the warehouse
Pack against a list built from your own product lines, with a printable manifest for the tote lids. The count you tap at setup becomes the opening number for the show, so nothing depends on remembering.
Tap a sale in two seconds while you are wrapping tissue paper, even in a barn with one bar of service. Entries queue on the device and sync the moment the phone finds a tower again.
Close a show and the shortfall list is already grouped the way you work: by kiln load, dye lot, hardware run or cut order. It tells you how many to make, not just what ran out.
Booth fee, jury fee, electricity, mileage at the current federal rate, lodging, helper pay and card fees come off the gross automatically. What you see is the number that landed in your account.
Type a booth fee and the app tells you how many of each line you must sell to clear it, using your real average basket from past shows. Applications get easier when the answer is a number.
Every show carries its city, county and state, so the season report splits taxable sales by the place they happened. Your preparer gets a clean sheet instead of a folder of card statements.
What changes by the third show
These come from accounts that closed out at least nine shows between March 2024 and December 2025. They are averages across a mixed circuit of outdoor fairs, indoor holiday markets and one day pop up events.
Once you can see which lines never move at a given show, you stop packing them. Makers carried 27 percent fewer unsold pieces to their last three markets of the year, which means fewer totes, a faster load out and less handling damage on delicate work.
The median gain came from two decisions: dropping the two shows their scorecard ranked lowest, and applying to one they had skipped because they assumed the fee was too steep. The math was already in the account. It just had to be read.
A season report with sales split by jurisdiction, fees itemized and mileage totaled replaces the week of matching bank lines to markets. Makers who used to spend a full working day on it now send a two page export and answer a couple of questions.
That is the median from the final count out tap to a finished scorecard, including entering fees and mileage. Doing it in the parking lot beats doing it Tuesday, because on Tuesday half the details are gone.
From the tents
I used to guess at my mug count all season. Now I know I walked into the Fourth Avenue show with 118 pieces and drove home with 54, and I know the tall tumblers in the speckled glaze sold out before lunch both days. My kiln schedule finally matches what people actually buy.
We were doing a two day show in Portland every August because we always had. The scorecard put it dead last after gas, the hotel and the ferry, three years running. We swapped it for a one day market forty minutes from the studio and cleared more before dinner.
Two of us work the booth and we both count from our own phones. It merges instead of fighting, which is more than I can say for the shared spreadsheet we used before. The belt widths that move at a music festival are not the ones that move at a holiday market, and now I have the sheet to prove it.
Plans priced like a booth fee, not a suite
Every plan includes offline counting, unlimited product lines, CSV import and export, and the season report your tax preparer wants.
For the spring market and a holiday run, worked solo.
For a full season of fairs, markets and pop up events.
For studios with staff, apprentices or two booths at once.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from the account screen. There is no season contract, no setup fee and no charge for the people you invite to look at a report. Prices shown are per studio account, not per show.
Asked at the booth next door
Weekend Maker is $12 per month and covers up to eight shows in a rolling twelve months, which suits a maker who does a spring market and a holiday run. Full Circuit is $29 per month with no cap on shows, booths or product lines, and it is the plan most full season vendors settle on. Maker Team is $69 per month and adds five staff logins, shared counting on one booth and a per person sales tally. Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars, and no plan asks for a season commitment.
Most makers have a working booth list inside one studio evening. You can type product lines straight in, paste them from a spreadsheet, or import a CSV export from your online shop and keep the same SKUs. The median time from first login to a priced booth list across our accounts is 22 minutes, because you only need name, variant, price and count to start counting a show. Cost per piece and material notes can be filled in later without redoing anything.
Yes. The counting and sales screens keep working with the signal off, which matters in a fairgrounds barn or a field where three hundred phones are fighting for one tower. Everything you tap is stored on the device and pushed up the moment you get a bar back, at the coffee stand or in the truck on the way home. Two people counting the same booth offline are merged by line item, not overwritten, so a late sync never erases a partner's tally.
You own every count, price, sale and show record you enter, and you can export the whole account to CSV at any hour without asking us. Data sits in US hosted infrastructure with encryption in transit and at rest, and access is limited to the accounts you invite. We do not sell, rent or share maker data with show promoters, suppliers or advertisers, and we do not run advertising trackers on this site. If you close your account we delete your records within 30 days of the request.
You can import a card reader batch as a CSV and match it to the show you just worked, which is how most vendors reconcile a busy Saturday without tapping every sale twice. Online shop exports from the common maker platforms import the same way, so a single product line carries one SKU across the booth and the website. There is a documented CSV format if your reader is unusual, and a read only API key on Full Circuit and Maker Team for makers who keep their own books in a spreadsheet. Nothing is required: plenty of accounts run entirely on counts and cash entries.
You cancel in the account screen and the plan stops at the end of the month you already paid for, with no exit call and no cancellation fee. Your records stay readable for 60 days so you can pull the season report you need for taxes, and export stays available that whole window. Many makers pause in January and come back in March before the first outdoor market, and returning accounts keep their old shows, SKUs and scorecards. Nothing is deleted early without you asking for it.
Booth and Bench, our magazine
Booth and Bench is written for makers who load a van on Friday and count the bins on Monday. Nine reports on what a weekend actually costs, what the states expect at the table, and what the numbers say about the next application. Here are three of them.
regulation and compliance
Every state with a sales tax expects a collected rate at the booth. Here is how temporary seller permits, local rate lookup, and post show filing actually work for a traveling maker.
numbers and benchmarks
Booth fee is the smallest line on most show budgets. Add jury fees, travel, lodging, staffing, card processing, and packaging, then work out the sales number that makes a weekend worth doing.
practical guide
A retail price has to carry materials, your hourly rate, booth costs, and room for a wholesale order later. Here is the arithmetic, and where makers usually leave money on the table.
Tell us about your season
Send the details below and we will set up a walkthrough using your own lines, your own prices and the next fair on your calendar. Nothing generic, nothing pretend.
Answered inside one business day, and never on a Saturday while your tent is up. Rather skip the form? Mail the same details to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and it reaches the same desk.