How long does your money sit in a card lot?

Two numbers, and a third one BreakCount deliberately does not show. Every open lot carries days held, counted from the date you bought it, and recovery, the share of its cost your sales have paid back in dollars. What it does not carry is a sell-through rate in units, a card count sold against a card count bought, because nothing in a lot's own record counts cards at all: a lot is one cost against its sales, never an item count.

That is worth saying plainly before the two real numbers, because "sell-through rate" almost always means units when a reseller types it, and recovery answers a dollar question instead. Both are useful. They are not the same question, and a tool that quietly swapped one for the other would be answering something you did not ask.

From the date you entered as Bought on to today, in your own timezone, while the lot is open; from Bought on to the date you closed it, once it is not. Both read the seller's own calendar date rather than the database's UTC one, so a lot does not appear to age or shrink a day at the wrong hour for your own timezone.

Age alone does not flag a lot; age combined with weak recovery does. A lot open 90 days that has recovered under half its cost enters the clearance band, and the same lot still stuck at 180 days becomes a death pile. A lot recovering well is left On pace at any age, and one that has paid back its whole cost is marked Covered, whatever its days held.

Ninety days is not a guess: it is the same clearance threshold BreakCount's own restock-and-clearance signals use elsewhere in the app, reused here rather than invented for a card lot. A lot that cost nothing cannot enter the clearance band at any age, because there is no cost left to recover.

The Inventory board flags a lot once it has been open 90 days and has recovered less than half its cost, and separates that into its own death-pile state at 180 days if the recovery has still not caught up. Those are the app's own clearance thresholds, not a universal rule: a lot recovering well past 50% is left alone at any age, and a lot that clears its whole cost is marked covered regardless of how long it took.

BreakCount tracks a lot's cost and its sales, never a count of the cards inside it. That is a deliberate absence rather than an oversight: a break or a case is bought and priced as one object, and building a per-card count would mean guessing how many cards a $2,100.00 case actually contained, which nothing a seller imports says. So the number the Inventory board shows in its progress bar is recovery, gross proceeds divided by cost, not units sold divided by units listed.

Recovery and sell-through can disagree sharply on the same lot. A case with ten expensive cards and forty commons can clear 80% of its dollar cost after the ten sell, while forty of fifty cards, 80% of the pile, are still sitting in a box. Reading a recovery percentage as a unit sell-through rate would tell you the box is nearly empty when it is nearly full, so BreakCount does not use the phrase for what it shows, and this page does not either.

Not in units, and it never claims to. A lot in BreakCount is bought and sold as one bulk cost against bulk proceeds; nothing in the schema counts how many individual cards a lot contained or how many have sold. What the Inventory board shows instead is recovery, the share of a lot's cost its sales have paid back in dollars, which is a related question and a different one.

The per-day figure beside an open lot is its gross proceeds so far divided by its days held, a pace, not a profit rate. A lot that brought in $688.10 over 11 days reads $62.55 a day; the same arithmetic on a lot 195 days old and $402.10 into its cost reads $2.06 a day. Neither figure has fees, commission or the lot's own remaining cost taken out of it yet, so a fast per-day number is a sign the lot is moving, not a sign the days are individually profitable.

Where the real profit per day lives is at the show level once a lot closes, not the open lot's running total: true hourly profit is the same caution applied to a live show instead of an open lot.

Because the Bought on field defaults to the day you add the lot, not the day you bought it, and BreakCount has no other record of the real purchase date to fall back on. Days held is only as accurate as that one field: backdate it when you enter a lot late, or the number measures how long it has been in BreakCount rather than how long it has been yours.

Days held and recovery exist to answer one question honestly: is this lot's money still tied up, or is it back. A lot stuck in the clearance band is frozen cash in the exact sense that post describes, cost that already left your account and has not come back yet, even though it never appears as a bad month in net profit. Pricing it out of the death pile is the other side of pricing break spots to clear their cost in the first place, and how a lot's cost splits across its sales is the mechanic recovery is built on.

None of it depends on knowing how many cards were in the box to start with, which is the whole point: a dollar answer works whether the lot was ten cards or a thousand. Tracking profit on Whatnot is where days held and recovery sit inside the wider picture.

The demo carries three open lots at different ages and recoveries so you can see the bands before importing anything. When you are ready, add a lot with its real purchase date and BreakCount starts counting from there.

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