I recently started using Excel to track my multi-realm flipping empire. I use a very simple system as I do not want to track information that isn’t useful to me. I can use TSM for detailed tracking, so I am only tracking the broad trends I care about.
Why track your activities?
The reason to track what you are doing is of course so you can improve it. By tracking sales and expenses you get a better idea of what you do. By tracking your total gold and your total sales as well as some select markets it is much easier to adjust on the fly and focus on the right actions.
I can use it the data to make more in-depth analysis if needed. If I feel like I’m stagnating I can easily actually check whether that is the case, what the likely culprit is and try to do something about it.
How should you track?
If you are on a single realm then TSM will be the best way to track the majority of your activities. It can easily track your total gold and total sales over time as well as your total expenses. You can use the ledger to look at your sales for specific items.
For multi-realm flipping TSM won’t track my total sales or total gold across all realms. It’s also really bad at tracking a specific market, such as BoE flipping, which is the market I am most interested in knowing about
Simplifying tracking
A really import concern is to make your tracking as simple as possible. You also want it to be useable for some nice summary or at a glance look at how your activities are working out.
I use Excel for tracking. I have two sheets where I do tracking, one where I track data on a per realm basis and one where I track my total stats.
Per realm tracking
For per realm tracking I have a list that looks like this. Each row is one day where I logged on, posted auctions and bought stuff. I track my gold earned and apent on Boes, my total gold and my total sales. Then the net gold from BoEs row and non-BoE sales rows are calculated.
This gives me easy access to the data so I can calculate average mailbox size, average net profit or loss from BoEs and track my total gold as shown in my sales analysis post.
Total tracking
My total tracking table is super simple. I just track my total gold and my total sales on a specific date. This is just to get a high level overview of how I’m doing.
Summary
Together this system lets me track the most important information that I can’t get directly from TSM with very little extra effort. It is probably the only way to track a multi realm setup efficiently as TSM does not support shared gold tracking. To track my total gold I also use altoholic even though the addon is outdated. Outside of that it’s just TSM, so the setup is fairly lean overall. Your tracking system should be based on what you want to know about. If you are just on one realm, then I would honestly suggest not doing any extra tracking as TSM does it better and easier. If you are on multiple realms then something like what I am doing may be just right though!
Are you tracking your sales and gold? Let me know in the comments!
Is this automated at all? Are you exporting TSM data with the app?
It’s manual sadly, I’ve considered making a system based on the accounting export, but it hasnt been a priority.