Are you an occassional seller, or a seller who just doesn't deal with thousands of listed items at a time? Do you prefer a pen and paper system for keeping track of your sales? Are you more interested in the big picture and not the details of the sales?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, I may have a system that will work for you. You will need the following items:

• File Storage
• Hanging Files
• File Folders
• Markers
• A Word Proccessing Program such as Word Perfect
• A bit of spare time

First take the Hanging Files and mark them with the months - Jan, Feb, etc.

Then you will put about 4 folders in each hanging file (More may be neccesary). Label these files spreadsheet, fees, expenses and postage.

Your spreadsheet can either be designed on the Word Proccessing program or made free hand by yourself. You will want to include these headers in any order you prefer:

1. Date Sold
2. Item Name
3. Item #
4. Cost to Ship
5. Sold For Amount
6. Shipping Charge
7. Cost to me

That is all the information you should need. For each month use a separate spreadsheet.

In your Postage folder you will put receipts from either a shipping program you may use or the local post office.

In the expenses folder keep receipts for all Ebay purchases. This includes inventory, packaging supplies, etc.

You can get your Ebay Fees from your monthly statement, under Seller Account on your My Ebay page. And Paypal Fees on the Paypal site.

To figure out your profit or loss for the month, all you need to do is add the fees together along with your expenses. This will give you one number. The next number you will need comes from your spreadsheet.

To figure this number use this formula for each row:

(Sold For + Shipping Fee) - (Actual Shipping + Cost) = Profit/Loss for item

Add these figures up to find your second number. Now take this figure and subtract your fees from it. This will tell you what your profit or loss was for that month.

This system is designed to help those who do not deal with a to of merchandise. For the Powersellers and other large volume sellers a computer generated spreadsheet program may be much more efficient!