Auction software for consignment to settlement, in one place.

Auction house management software runs a sale from consignment intake to settlement in one record. It covers consignor records, lot and catalogue details, bidder registration and approval, timed or live bidding, invoicing, and consignor payment. Its job is to keep every lot, bid, and payment fact in one place, so staff, buyers, and consignors are not working from different versions.

Buy an existing auction platform when it handles your sale types, fee rules, and settlement rules with reasonable setup and its pricing makes sense. Have software made for your house when your workflow is itself the difference: sale types, charges, or settlement rules the maintained products cannot represent cleanly, or connections to your accounting and other systems that cannot be done cleanly any other way. If your sale rules are still changing every week, settle them first.

One connected workflow covers consignment intake, cataloguing, bidding, invoicing, and consignor settlement. Intake records the consignor, the goods, and the agreed terms. Cataloguing turns those goods into lots with descriptions, images, estimates, and reserves. Bidding records timed or live bids against those lots. Invoicing turns results into buyer and consignor documents. Settlement pays the consignor from cleared buyer payments, less commission and agreed costs. This page covers that scope plainly; it does not claim adjacent coverage that does not exist.

A timed auction runs online over days, with no auctioneer in the room. Lots close at set times, and many houses extend a lot briefly when a bid lands near the close. A live webcast auction is run by an auctioneer at a set time, with bidders in the room, on the phone, by absentee bid, and online at the same time. A lot opens when the auctioneer offers it and closes when the auctioneer declares it sold. The software must enforce whichever closing and extension rules your house has set for that sale.

An absentee bid is a maximum left with the house before the sale. It is executed at the lowest price the competition allows, not automatically at the maximum. When two bids tie, the outcome follows the rule your house has set in advance: for example, the earliest bid wins, or the bid from the room wins. The rule must be written down before the sale, because a tie decided on the day looks like favouritism, even when it is not.

The hammer price is rarely the whole price. Buyers usually also pay a buyer's premium, a percentage added to the hammer, plus tax on that premium where it applies, and sometimes an extra charge for bidding live online, plus packing, shipping, or collection costs. Rates vary by house, so the terms of each sale must state them plainly. Software should show the buyer the full figure before they commit, not after.

A lot that does not reach its reserve goes unsold and produces no sale. After the sale, the house and the consignor agree what happens next: the lot may be offered again in a later sale, offered after the sale at or above reserve, repriced with the consignor's approval, returned to the consignor, or disposed of under the consignment agreement. The agreement should state the choice, the collection window, and any storage charge, before the goods are accepted.

Consignors are paid from buyer payments that have actually cleared, less commission and agreed costs such as transport. Lots whose buyer has not yet paid are normally held back, while lots whose buyer has paid are settled on their own. Your house sets the settlement timing in its terms; the software must track each lot separately, so one unpaid buyer does not hold up every other consignor in the same sale.

Registration and approval are house rules enforced by the software, not decided by it. The house sets who may bid, what identification or deposit it requires, and which bidders need approval before they can bid. Consignor checks work the same way: the house sets what it verifies before accepting goods and when it may refuse a consignment or delay settlement until checks are complete. Every approval, refusal, and payment should leave a record of who did what.

Yes, when the accounting product offers suitable access and your finance lead owns the mapping. Define which system owns consignors, lots, invoices, payments, and settlement, and test duplicates, closed periods, retries, rejected postings, and reconciliation before sale day. RaftLabs builds the connection; your finance team approves the accounting treatment and controls.

Yes, when each sale carries its own settings: fees, terms, registration rules, dates, and bidding format. An art sale and a machinery sale can then behave differently inside the same system, instead of forcing every sale into one template. The settings that change a sale's money rules should be visible and changeable only by staff roles your house has approved.

The first paid phase may cover a bounded audit, a proof of concept, a recovery plan, or a small first release. The final price depends on how many sale types it must support, how many kinds of users it serves, what it needs to connect to, whether data needs moving over, whether phones or tablets are involved on the saleroom floor, and the condition of existing code. The agreed phase is priced in writing before it starts.

You judge what you can see, not the code. Every checkpoint is working software you click through yourself, tested against the sale workflow agreed at the start: take in a consignment, catalogue it, run bids against it, invoice it, and settle it. Progress is reported in plain language: what changed, what is next, and what it costs. Because you own the code, the accounts, and the operating notes throughout, nothing about the work is locked inside our heads. Our job is to make the work checkable; your job is to check it against your business.

You own the code built for you and control where it lives, the cloud accounts, the data, analytics, and third-party subscriptions. Outside services and open-source pieces keep their own licence terms. The operating notes and handover material stay current so another capable team can take over.