Trade Skill Master: Accounting

The TradeSkillMaster Addon (TSM) has a great module called Accounting. It does various things including the tracking of your sales, purchases and the items sold. This module hold all of your sales and purchase information. Please keep in mind that it starts tracking once you add it to TSM but it will not back track anything prior to the addon being installed. There are many ways that this information can be useful so I highly recommend you have a look around this module.


The accounting module can be identified by the stack of coins located on the left of the TSM logo.

Once you click the Accounting button you will have a choice of a few tabs.

Sales Tab

The sales tab shows a list of items sold, how many were sold and for what price. It also lists how long ago the item(s) sold. This a a great tool for studying your market to see what sells and what sits. It also includes a search option so you can check in on specific items quickly.

This way I can see what a specific item sells for and see where items are most likely to sell for more. Some items have a pattern of selling better on certain days. This also lets me keep an eye on fluctuations in the price. If I see that the sale price varies from 3 gold to 5 gold each then I can consider only selling the item for 4-5 gold. This will mean that the my items won't always be posted but it will mean that I only post them for sale at a premium. 

This is also a great way to test the market. If you post an item at 10 gold and it never sells but it does sell at 5 gold then you know 10 gold is to high but 5 gold is liked. You can then push your price up a little each time to test the limits of what an item will sell for. Overall, the sales option gives you a good amount of information regarding what you sell and how it behaves on the auction house.

Purchases Tab

The purchases tab holds all of the information about items you have purchased. Similar to the sales tab, this information can be a great tool for tracking variations in the market with regards to your purchases. If you happen to purchase something to flip but can't remember what you paid for the item then this is a priceless tool. Just like the sales tab you can search for specific items and determine your markup based on the purchase price.  

Items Tab

This tab lists the averages for your items bought and sold. This is great if you want a summary of activity. 

Resale

The resale tab gives you a list of items that you have purchased off the auction house and then posted again. If you flip items at all then this tab is an excellent place to have a look. The advantage of this tab is the average profit. It lets you know what items are being sold at a a profit or a loss. This can be great for considering what to sell in the future.

One of the great features of the resale section is that it gives you the ability to look at each item individually.

You simply hover over an item you wish to see more information on and click. This will open the stats page for that specific item.

Why is this data important? This information can help you to narrow down a market on a specific item. If you wanted to purchase all of the [Awesome Thing] for 5 gold and under and then post it for 10 gold each then this would be the way you could track it to see if it is profitable. This sort of flipping can work well in the profession leveling materials market. This market can fluctuate and be a bit erratic.  If someone is leveling their mining they might flood the auction house with ore but once that ore clears there is none available until someone else decides to level mining. In situation where your market is doing this, then you can actually create a stable market and at the same time make a nice profit. Purchase from the guy leveling mining and sell at a nice markup when the auction house is empty of that item.

Resale also lists the people purchasing from you. This feature lets you track regular buyers and even lets you see if your competitors are purchasing the items you are selling. I have often watched my competition to test their maximum buy out price for an item. If I know that BettySue likes to purchase all of the [Awesome Thing]s on the auction house under 5 gold them I can purchase all of the [Awesome Thing]s under 4 gold and repost them for 4 gold 99 silver. It is favorable because it creates a nice fast profit.

Summary Tab

The summary tab shows you your overall sales and purchases broken down to show what item you have made the most gold from as well as what item you make gold from with regards to quantity.

Options Tab

The options tab lets you set how you would like to view this module. Most of the options are fairly self explanatory but I do want to mention the "Don't prompt to record trades" check box. This lets you disable the trade prompt. When you trade an item for gold it will attempt to record it as a sale. It will pop up a prompt that looks like this:

Alternatively, when you purchase and item via trade you will be prompted with something like this:

This feature is set up so that transactions via trade are counted. If you want everything traded in exchange for gold to be recorded then you can disable this option. I prefer to leave it as is and let it prompt me. I sometimes purchase items that I wish to send to other characters and would prefer to not record them as part of my sales.

This brings me to the one downside of this module. It will record any items you purchase for personal use and that can sometimes skew the statistics a bit. You can combat this by not purchasing personal items on the characters you auction on. However, I have not found this to interfere much and just keep it in mind when looking at the data.

Conclusion

This module is all about information and information can be an outstanding tool. If you take a little time to check out the information and look for creative ways to use that information then you can make the art of gold making quite profitable. Not everyone wants to crunch the numbers for every item but this module is set up to be useful at a glance as well as useful with an in depth look.