Artist Consignment Statement Template for Galleries

An artist consignment statement answers three questions the artist actually has: what sold, what you owe, and what is still on the wall. When the statement is late or inconsistent from month to month, the relationship absorbs the friction — even when every number is correct.

A statement is easy to automate once the terms are explicit: the works on consignment, the commission split, the period covered, and the rule for anything that changed after the cutoff. Once those stay steady, an assistant can assemble the draft and your gallery can spend its time checking the sales, not rebuilding the layout.

What belongs in a consignment statement

Keep it to one page per artist where you can. A useful structure is:

1. Header: artist name, gallery name, statement period, and statement date.
2. Works on consignment: title, year, medium, dimensions, agreed retail price, and consignment date.
3. Sales this period: work sold, sale price, sale date, buyer reference, commission split, and net due to the artist.
4. Payments and balance: amounts already paid, amount due this period, and payment status.
5. Returns and releases: works returned to the artist or moved to another location.
6. Still on consignment: the works that remain, with how long each has been placed.

An appendix can hold sale documentation or images. The main page should stay focused on money and inventory movement.

Write a source map before you automate

Every figure on the statement needs a named home. A small table prevents the most damaging failure — a clean-looking statement built from a stale sales log.

Statement item	Source	Owner	Freshness rule
Sales and sale prices	Gallery sales log (spreadsheet)	Registrar	Closed through statement date
Consignment terms and split	Signed consignment agreement	Director	As signed; note amendments
Works on hand	Inventory list	Registrar	Reconciled at month end
Payments made	Bookkeeping / accounting file	Bookkeeper	Cleared payments only

Give the statement a fixed cutoff

Set the period and cutoff in the instructions: "Cover March 1 through March 31. Use sales recorded by April 2. Flag anything entered later." A fixed cutoff makes the statement reproducible and gives each artist the same treatment. When a sale is pending or a payment has not cleared, the statement should name it as pending rather than fold it into the total.

Separate settled from pending

A trustworthy statement keeps three states distinct:

• Settled: the work sold, the payment cleared, the artist's net is due or paid.
• In progress: the work sold but payment has not cleared, or a collector hold is in place.
• Open: the work is still on consignment.

Labeling these prevents the common dispute where a gallery and an artist disagree about whether a piece "sold" because one side counted a reservation.

A prompt for the consignment statement

Use this as a starting brief:

Prepare the consignment statement for [artist] for [month] using the sales log and inventory list I select. For each work, show title, agreed retail price, sale price, sale date, commission split, and net due to the artist. Separate settled sales from pending ones and list works still on consignment with their placement date. Total the amount due this period and note payments already made. Never invent a sale, price, or payment. Deliver a one-page statement and a supporting spreadsheet to me for review.

Prepare the draft, keep the approval

The statement should reach the person accountable before it reaches the artist. Check the sale prices, the split applied, cleared payments, and anything marked pending. Then send it through your normal process — the artist hears from the gallery, not from software.

Deck's scheduled tasks send one consolidated email to you. It can read the sales log and inventory from selected Deck Projects and supported read-only connections such as Notion, and it can attach the statement and a spreadsheet as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, or CSV. Deck only emails you — it never sends statements to your artists on its own, which keeps the client relationship in your hands.

The same assistant works from its own email address the rest of the month. Forward it a collector inquiry or a supplier thread and a drafted reply in your voice comes back to you. By default it reads only what you send it, and it replies only to you. Larger galleries can link several email addresses to one assistant and run it on their own domain, studio@yourgallery.com instead of the default @agent.hellodeck.ai.

See client reporting for the product workflow, and how to automate your gallery's monthly sales and inventory report for the internal view of the same data. The KPI tracker routine is a recurring starting point once your source map is set.

Get your Deck assistant and send last month's statement with your standing terms. That prior statement is usually the fastest way to make the reporting contract visible.