Columbia City Gallery - Consign for Square
What was the problem?
The Columbia City Gallery is a member-operated fine arts gallery in Seattle, Washington. Through rotating exhibitions and a gift shop, the gallery supports hundreds of local artists as a channel for discovery and sales. All sales are on a commission agreement, where the gallery retains a percentage of each sale.
To manage artists and their works in Square, each artist is assigned a three letter code that is added as a prefix to all items created in Square. At the end of the month, the gallery manager would export a by item sales report from Square, transform it into a pivot table in Excel with cross-reference to an artist table for commission rate calculations, separate each summary for artists into separate tables, and then share them with artists by email.
That’s a lot of work for the several dozen artists that receive sales every month. Too often, the sales reports were delayed or had inaccuracies that required time consuming resolution. For artists, delays in sales reports not only lead to slower payouts, but also delay important decision making about what to produce next.
What we did.
With Consign for Square, sales reports are generated without any manipulation of spreadsheets or time consuming work to create emails to send to artists. Sales reporting is streamlined by relying on a Square API integration so that the gallery manager knows that the sales and artist information they are producing is based on the exact information in Square. Issues, such as unattributed sales or missing artist information, are proactively flagged in Consign for Square as they come up.
How is Consign for Square benefiting the Columbia City Gallery?
With Consign for Square, gallery management now easily generates their monthly sales reports for artists, providing artists with timely payment and information, which in turn is used by artists to inform their decision about what work to focus and stock at the gallery. A simpler process also means that the task of generating sales reports can be delegated and easily transferred to new managers, allowing the gallery to focus more time on curation and less on administration.