Running a gallery means juggling inventory, clients, consignments, invoices, and art fair logistics — often simultaneously, often without reliable internet. This is a practical guide to how Art Aura fits into that daily reality.

A day at the gallery

Consider a fairly ordinary Tuesday. A shipment arrives from an artist: four new paintings, each needing to be catalogued. A collector emails to ask about availability. A sale from last week needs an invoice. And somewhere in between, you are preparing for an art fair in ten days.

With Art Aura, the shipment gets catalogued as it is unpacked. You photograph each work with the iPad camera, enter the title, medium, dimensions, and price, and mark the status as "On Consignment" since these belong to the artist. The whole process takes perhaps three minutes per work, and the photographs are stored directly in the app — no separate photo library to manage, no folder of JPEGs to cross-reference later.

The collector's email is easy to answer. You open Smart Search and type "available abstract paintings." The results appear instantly, filtered and sortable. You can share an artwork's details directly from the app, including the image, or connect your iPad to the gallery's display screen and walk through the options with a visiting client in person.

The invoice takes about thirty seconds. Open the sale, tap "Generate Invoice," and Art Aura produces a professional PDF with your gallery's details, the client's name and address, the line item, VAT calculations if applicable, and your bank details for payment. Email it directly from the app, and the invoice status automatically updates to "Sent."

Consignment tracking

Most galleries operate on consignment for at least part of their inventory. An artist places works with the gallery, the gallery sells them, and the proceeds are split according to an agreed rate — typically somewhere between 50/50 and 60/40 in the gallery's favour, depending on the relationship and the market.

Art Aura handles this natively. When recording a sale, you can mark it as a consignment and enter the consignment rate. The app automatically calculates the artist's share and the gallery's share. You can track whether the artist has been paid, record the payment date and method, and even include a payment reference number.

This matters at the end of the month when you need to reconcile. Rather than cross-referencing spreadsheets, you can see at a glance which artists are owed money, how much, and for which works. The financial reports separate owned inventory from consignment works, so your valuations and your obligations are never confused.

A practical example

Say you sell a painting for €8,000 on a 60/40 consignment. Art Aura records the full sale amount, calculates the artist's share (€3,200) and the gallery's share (€4,800), and tracks the artist payment status separately from the client payment. When you pay the artist, you mark it as paid with the date, and the sale record reflects the complete transaction history.

Invoicing and VAT

For European galleries, VAT is an unavoidable complexity. Art Aura supports configurable VAT rates, and each invoice can include or exclude VAT as needed. The app calculates the net amount, the VAT amount, and the total, and prints all three on the invoice along with your VAT number.

You configure your VAT settings once in Settings: your VAT rate (common rates include 19% in Germany, 20% in France, 25% in Sweden), your VAT number, and your preferred reporting period. From then on, every invoice is generated correctly.

The invoice lifecycle is tracked through four stages: Not Invoiced, Invoiced, Sent, and Paid. Each stage has a colour-coded badge so you can see the status at a glance. From the Invoices view, you can filter by status — useful at the end of the quarter when you need to chase unpaid invoices or prepare a VAT return.

Speaking of VAT returns: Art Aura generates VAT reports as PDFs, broken down by the reporting period you have configured. These are not a substitute for proper accounting software, but they give you a clean summary to hand to your accountant, saving both of you time.

Currencies

The art market operates across borders, and Art Aura supports fifteen currencies: the major art market currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, HKD, CNY) plus nine others commonly used in international transactions. You set your preferred display currency in Settings, and all values are shown consistently throughout the app.

When generating reports, you can choose a different display currency from a dropdown. The app converts all monetary values using exchange rates, so you can produce an inventory valuation in euros for your insurance broker, then switch to Swiss francs for a client in Basel, then back to your local currency for your own records. The conversion happens during PDF generation, so the report is a clean, self-contained document.

Financial reporting

Art Aura generates four types of reports, all as professional PDFs:

Additionally, you can generate price lists (a clean list of available works with prices, suitable for sharing with clients) and detailed inventory sheets (comprehensive per-artwork documentation for insurance or estate purposes).

All reports can be exported as PDFs or CSVs. The PDFs are designed to look professional — they include your gallery's name and address, the date of generation, and Art Aura's branding in the footer. They are intended to be documents you could hand to a client, an insurer, or a bank.

Art fair preparation

Art fairs present a specific set of challenges. You are away from the gallery, often with unreliable internet, meeting clients who expect you to have your entire inventory at your fingertips. Decisions happen quickly. A collector asks if you have anything else by a particular artist, or wants to know the provenance of a work, or needs a price list emailed before their flight home.

Art Aura is designed for exactly this situation. Everything is stored on-device, so there is no dependency on connectivity. Smart Search lets you find works by artist, medium, size, price range, or availability using natural language — "available sculptures under fifty thousand" or "works by Lindqvist from the 1990s." If you have an iPad connected to an external display at your booth, you can present artworks in full-screen while keeping the controls and details on your iPad screen.

When a sale happens at the fair, you record it immediately: select the artwork, select or create the client, enter the amount. The artwork's status changes to "Sold." You can generate the invoice on the spot, or batch-process all fair sales afterwards. The batch mode is particularly useful — select all the sales from the week, and generate or email invoices for all of them in one pass.

After the fair, you have a complete record: what sold, to whom, at what price, which invoices have been sent, which payments are outstanding. No reconstruction from memory, no reconciling handwritten notes with a spreadsheet.

Importing existing data

Few galleries start from scratch. Most have years of records in spreadsheets, databases, or other systems. Art Aura supports two import formats:

CSV import is designed for galleries migrating from Excel or Google Sheets. Export your spreadsheet as a CSV file with columns for title, artist, year, medium, dimensions, price, status, and description. Art Aura auto-detects headers, handles quoted fields with embedded commas, and flags duplicates based on title. Most spreadsheets can be imported in under a minute.

Unix colon format is a more niche option, included for legacy databases that use the 1982 Berkeley format. If you have data in this format — or know someone who does — Art Aura can read it directly, handling the format's various quirks including year ranges and variable field counts. This importer was originally built for Richard Hamilton's archive of 785 works, and it has been tested against real-world data with all its inconsistencies.

Natural language search

On devices with Apple Intelligence (iPad Pro M1 or later, iPad Air M1 or later, iPhone 15 Pro or later), Art Aura's Smart Search understands natural language. You can type queries like:

On devices without Apple Intelligence, the same queries work through a keyword parser. The results are the same; the AI simply makes the interpretation more flexible. Either way, search is fast — your entire collection is indexed locally, with no network round-trip.

How it compares

Feature Art Aura ArtLogic Artwork Archive
Annual cost $49 once $2,400+/year $144/year
Works offline Yes, fully Partial No
On-device AI Yes No No
Data privacy On-device only Cloud-hosted Cloud-hosted
Invoice generation Yes, with VAT Yes No
Consignment tracking Yes Yes Limited
Multi-currency 15 currencies Yes Limited
Platforms iPad, iPhone, Mac, Watch Web Web, iOS

This comparison is not meant to dismiss the larger platforms. ArtLogic, in particular, is an excellent product with deep CRM features, website integration, and shipping management that Art Aura does not attempt. If your gallery has a full-time registrar and turns over several million a year, ArtLogic or a similar platform may well be worth the investment.

But for the vast majority of galleries — the independent spaces, the project rooms, the advisors working from a home office, the mid-career gallerists who handle their own administration — the enterprise platforms are overkill. Art Aura covers the core workflow: inventory, clients, sales, invoices, reports. It does so without requiring internet access, without storing your data on someone else's servers, and without a recurring subscription.

Getting started

Art Aura is free for up to thirty artworks and twenty clients, with all features available. This is not a trial period — there is no time limit. A small gallery with a focused programme could use the free version indefinitely.

When you need more capacity, a single payment of $49 removes all limits permanently. No subscription, no annual renewal, no per-user fees. The purchase includes Family Sharing, so multiple devices on the same Apple ID can use the full version.

The recommended starting point is simple: add one artwork, photograph it, fill in the details, and see how it feels. Then import your client list from your iPad's Contacts app (one tap). Then record a sale and generate an invoice. Within half an hour, you will have a clear sense of whether the app fits your workflow.

I built Art Aura because I spent decades watching galleries struggle with tools that were either too primitive or too expensive. The art world deserves software that respects both the work and the people who handle it. That means simplicity where possible, depth where necessary, and privacy always.