From chaos a little order...

I've blocked out the names for privacy. But the basic gist of it is
_\______________________________/__
_O_____________________________O
Buyer Name - Total $Price (varies for US vs international & some folks use discounts won or earned)

Payment history date #1 / $payment
Payment history date #2 / $payment
Payment history date #3/ $payment

Balance owed..
__________________________________

So that's my new (really pretty unremarkable - lol!) quick new thing I’ve come up with to simplify MY life anyhow It might help other folks I know with items “on layaway” (under time payments – someone just said the layaway thing to me recently and I had to giggle but it’s true!). It TOTALLY is NOT the only place I keep track of things of course but I"m so visual that I like to catalog at a glance.

So for my painted horses under payments I like to have a postit or sheet somewhere near the horse so I know at a glance when things were paid for, what remains on the balance OR -> (very often) if the horse is waiting to ship out for some other reason (people are moving, waiting to ship with a friend .. you name it!). So since there’s always a story behind horses, when you start getting a good # of them going you look around & go “I know these guys are all spoken for but what's the deal with him or her?”.

I like to group by certain statuses too. Payments coming in small frequent bunches make me want to move a horse to be easily at hand.

I note it all down on spreadsheets too but printing out is wasteful of paper (especially if you have frequent updates) and thus I came to this notion! REUSABLE little hangers. This way stickits don’t fall off (because in the unpainted horse area things are packed together tighter clearly!). Something that I can write on with pencil and erase, even reuse on future horses. And my color coded flags still apply too.

I really like the system and just had to share in case it helps someone else down the road. It’s a challenge when there are horses on payments and back ordered. But a tag doesn’t have to hang on a horse either I guess. At any rate – probably the biggest benefit is to reassure me that the shelf lined with horses IS indeed not all waiting to sell, whew! AND it also lets me know when my reality doesn’t match my spreadsheet (most often this happens when a horse is sent out as a donation or mailed the day it’s paid for in a big ole hurry/rush to the PO and no time was even taken to log it down on the spreadsheet).

Striving to ward off the entropy any way I can! :)