Keeping track of your sales during a convention appearance is important for several reasons. First, you need to track sales in order to accurately account for sales taxes and income taxes. Secondly, it’s important to track which items are selling better than others as you decide on what types of items to offer in the future. Third, it’s always helpful when planning how much of each item to ship to a convention. And finally, if you buy books in bulk and claim them as inventory in your income taxes, you’ll need these numbers when you get home to adjust your count.

With all of these reasons, you’d think there would be a better way to track sales, but as you go from booth to booth, you see two derivations of the same system. The first is a chart the artist keeps behind the table and marks on to record each sale. If they remember to.

The second, less visible, method is to simply count the items before the show and count them after the show, subtracting to find the difference.

Pretty unassuming, isn’t it?

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