Every silent auction item is going to need a bid sheet or else it wouldn’t be a silent auction! AT has a report to easily create bid sheets.
1. First of all, you will need to have assigned your items to stores and give them numbers before you can print the bid sheets. Then, go to the Before Auction tab and choose the Item Reports.
You can search for just one Item by entering the Item Name or you can search for and Item by the Donor Name. Typically, when you want to print multiple bid sheets you would search for a store. We will use The Orchard in this example. Once you select a store click the Search button. You will see your Search results below.
2. You will need to select the report called Bid Sheets - Manual Bid or Bid Sheets - Bids Provided. The Bid Sheets - Manual Bid will give you a bid sheet where the bidder will enter their own dollar amount. If you choose the Bid Sheets - Bids Provided, the dollar amounts will already be on the sheet and the bidder will simply write down their paddle number. If you don’t remember you can always click on the Report Description links to see what each report will give you. If you don’t want the bid sheets to print for all of the items in a store, you can just select 1 or more.
3. Let’s see the Bid Sheets - Manual Bid report first.
A. At the top, you have the option to include an auction logo if you use one for your auction. The logo will be printed on each bid sheet.
B. Then choose the Bid Type.
i. If you choose Calculated, At will put the starting bid at 50% in this example (or whatever you decide). So if the item is valued at $20, it will put the starting bid at $10. You can also include the Buy It Now option and decide what value that should be if someone just has to have the item and doesn’t want to stand around until the store closes.
ii. If you choose Exact Amounts Per Item, you get to set the Starting Bid and Minimum Increment for each item. You can decide to just to this for a few items and then AT will use the amounts you have entered under the Calculated Bid Type for the rest. For this example I entered $100 for the starting bid and $10 for the increment bid for item #201.
C. Once you have the values the way you want, choose Build Report at the bottom of the list.
Your bid sheet report will generate and look like this:
As you can see, for item #201 it entered $100 for the starting bid and $10 for the increment bid. It then took the amounts listed for the calculated bid for item #202 and put $8 or roughly half for the minimum starting bid. This can be hard for the bidders if you have many items and all having different increment bids. This is when the Bid Sheets - Bids Provided report comes in handy!
4. Here is a look at the Bid Sheets - Bids Provided Report. Once you choose this report it will pop up a link to edit the parameters.
When you click on the Edit Bid Sheet Parameters link you will get a screen like this:
It is similar to the Manual Bid Parameters, but without the option of choosing for each item what the minimum and increment should be. Once you have the % amounts the way you want, choose Submit and it will take you back to the previous screen where you will choose Build Report.
As you can see, the starting bid is 50% of the value. AT will calculate out the increment bids from what is left to get to the Buy It Now option.
Once you have them printed, simply cut them down the middle and put them with the item on the display tables. Be sure to have lots of pens - without caps, for quick bidding!
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