Inventory management for the smallest of small businesses.

Saturday, seven-thirty in the morning. The maker pulls into the fairground parking lot with two totes of handmade ceramics in the back of the car. She unloads, sets up the booth in about twenty minutes — folding table, the cloth banner her sister hemmed last year, a string of warm bulbs on a battery pack. She pulls her phone out of her apron, opens MySmallBusiness, and glances at the inventory list. Forty-seven mugs across twelve designs. Twenty-three small bowls. Nine ring dishes. She knows exactly what she brought, and she can see at a glance which patterns ran thin last weekend.

Nine-fifteen. First customer of the day, a woman in a denim jacket who has been circling for ten minutes. She finally points at the speckled-blue mugs and says she wants two, and she also wants to add the little bowl she has been holding. The maker taps Sell on her phone, taps the speckled-blue mug, taps quantity two, taps the bowl. Total fifty-eight dollars. The customer hands over three twenties. The maker closes out the sale, gives back the change, hands over the wrapped pieces. Stock drops from eight to six on the speckled-blue and from five to four on that bowl, automatically, before she has even said goodbye.

Ten-thirty. The bored teenager from the booth two down wanders over and asks about the marbled bowls — his mom's birthday is next week. The maker does not have to dig through the totes underneath the table. She taps Bowls in the app, sees that the marbled bowl is the third variant of the bowl product, sees she has two left in walnut and one in maple. She tells him: two walnut, one maple, that is the lot. He nods, says he will think about it, walks off. Five minutes later a different customer buys one of the walnut ones outright, and the maker is glad she knew the count.

Noon, sort of a lunch break. She is eating a granola bar standing up at the booth because she does not want to leave it. She pulls up the daily total: three hundred and twelve dollars so far, which is good for a slow morning. She also notices that two of her best-sellers from last weekend — the lavender mug and the navy ring dish — are already gone. The inventory list shows the lavender mug at zero in stock with a small red badge next to it. She makes a mental note, and a typed note in the app: at the next firing, double the lavender batch.

Two in the afternoon. A repeat customer stops by, says she remembers buying a cobalt-glaze piece at the spring market and asks whether the maker is still doing custom orders. The maker says yes, taps Customer on the sale screen, types the woman's name and email right there. The next sale she makes — a single small bowl — gets tagged with the customer record. So when the maker gets home Sunday night and a custom-order email lands in her inbox, she will know which customer at which fair this lead came from. Nothing to reconstruct.

Four-thirty. The slow hour. Foot traffic has thinned and the sun is in her eyes. She uses the lull to add a brand-new product to the catalog from her phone — a small espresso cup she just decided to start selling. Photo from the side, photo from the top. Price fourteen dollars. Quantity six. Ninety seconds, start to finish. By the time the next customer wanders up, the cup is live on the inventory list, available to ring up, and one of the six is already sold.

Five fifty-five. Five minutes until the fair officially closes. She glances at the day. Five hundred and eighty-four dollars in sales. Nineteen individual items moved through her hands. The lavender mug went from twelve to zero. The marbled bowl is gone. The new espresso cup sold one. She knows exactly what to fire on Monday. She does not have to reconstruct any of it from memory tonight, or scribble totals onto the back of a vendor form, or open a spreadsheet on her laptop later when she is exhausted.

Six-fifteen. Packing the booth back into the totes. Two ring dishes, three navy mugs, eleven of the speckly ones, six bowls, five espresso cups. Into the totes they go. The app already knows what came home. There is no spreadsheet to reconcile, no scribbled notebook to type up later, no second bookkeeping pass on Sunday. The shop, all day, lived on her phone. The only spreadsheet she touched was the one with the booth fee at the bottom — the one the fair organizer handed her on the way out.