Consignments, reports, condition reports

THE CONSIGNMENT NOTE

The registrar is a galleries' module: another kind of house does not see it.

« New consignment » asks for three things: the direction — incoming, received on consignment, or outgoing, entrusted to a third party — the counterparty, and the start date. A consignment is born as a draft; you have to activate it.

The printable document carries the fourteen clauses the trade expects: author, title, date, medium, dimensions, edition number, condition and insurance value for each work, then duration, agreed price, discount latitude, commission, reproduction rights and return conditions as terms of the contract.

The issuer of the note is your house, never the platform. If its legal identity is incomplete, the document still comes out, overprinted « DRAFT — issuer identity to be completed ».

THE SIGNED DOCUMENT

Once signed, you upload the note — PDF or image, 20 MB at most, 500 MB in total for your house. It is filed away from the photographs of works, in a space that has no public address at all: it structurally cannot be published.

You alone can reach it, as a download, from your portal.

CLOSING A CONSIGNMENT

Closing handles every work still on the note, according to its case:

• A work already sold is simply settled: a sale is not a return.
• On an incoming consignment, the work becomes « returned », leaves your ownership, and receives a return-to-artist movement.
• On an outgoing consignment, the piece comes home: it goes back to stock, becomes available again, and receives a reintegration movement.

THE FIVE REPORTS

All of them exclude archived works, and none of them ever mixes two currencies.

• INVENTORY — how many works and for what value, by location or by ownership regime.
• CONSIGNMENTS DUE — active consignments whose end date has passed or falls within the next thirty days.
• SOLD BUT STILL ON PREMISES — the sale is done, the piece has not left.
• OVERDUE RETURNS — a work's last movement carries an expected return date that has passed, and the piece is not home.
• STOCK AGE — four bands since acquisition: 0-90, 91-180, 181-365, and beyond a year.

THE INSURANCE SCHEDULE

This is a FROZEN document, numbered without gaps, that you hand to your insurer. It cannot be edited and cannot be deleted: one per date, twenty a day at most.

For each work the value is looked up in order: an agreed value, then the one declared by the depositor, then a figure computed from your prices. If nothing resolves, the line is an ANOMALY, never a zero — a zero would look like a worthless work, and your insurer could not tell the difference.

No currency is ever converted. A value in a currency other than the report's is treated as unresolved, and the anomaly names the currencies it found.

CORRECTING A CONDITION REPORT

A locked condition report is not corrected: it is replaced. You create a new one, which names the previous one as superseded. That is the registrar's rule — a dated record that could be rewritten would be worth nothing to an insurer.

Only at locking does the report receive its reference and its fingerprint. A draft superseded before locking never burns a number.

Movements follow the same rule: you do not cancel a movement, you write the opposite one.