title: “Taking work off the gallery floor”
Taking work off the gallery floor
Recording that a piece has physically come off the wall, seeing which pieces are due to, and printing a pick list of what to collect.
Audience: gallery staff. Everything here is in the admin portal under Artwork Catalog → Artworks.
It is not the same thing as whether a piece is for sale
This is the one idea the rest of the page rests on.
A piece’s status — Available, Reserved, Sold, On loan, Not for sale, Archived — answers can this be bought. Whether it is on the gallery floor answers is it physically on the wall. They are separate questions and they have separate answers.
- A sold piece often hangs for another fortnight, until the buyer collects it.
- An available piece can be in the back room while a show is rehung.
So taking a piece off the floor never changes its status, never removes it from the public site, and never makes an unsellable piece sellable again. The two are recorded separately because they genuinely are two facts.
The clearest case is the routine one, and it happens every month:
| Date | What happens | |
|---|---|---|
| The membership ends | 31 Aug 2026 | From 1 September the artist’s work cannot be bought anywhere — website, online store, or the till. |
| The gallery walks the floor | 6 Sep 2026 | Staff collect the pieces and take them off the wall. |
For those few days the work is unsellable and still hanging, which is exactly right. A single field could not describe it.
Taking a piece off the floor
Each row in the artwork list carries a 🖼 Remove from floor button.
It asks you to confirm first, and the confirmation says in plain words what will and will not happen — because the reasonable worry is that taking a piece down also takes it off sale. It does not.
Once confirmed, the row records who removed it and when. That is the point of the feature: an inventory record that nobody’s name is on cannot be asked about later, so the system will not create one. Nothing is ever marked removed automatically, however obvious it looks — a piece comes off the floor when a person walks the gallery and takes it off the wall, and only then.
You can add a short note saying why. It is free text rather than a fixed list of reasons, because work leaves the floor for all sorts of reasons — returned to the artist, sold and collected, damaged, out on loan, rotated into storage — and a list written in advance would be guesswork about your gallery.
The row then shows a grey Off the floor badge. Hover it to see who took it off, when, and the note.
Putting it back
↩ Back on floor on the same row, and it is on the wall again.
No confirmation, and no special permission — the same staff who can take a piece down can put it back. Rehanging a piece is an ordinary event, not a repair, and treating it as one would make people reluctant to record the removal in the first place.
Which pieces are due off the floor
When an artist’s membership ends, their work is collected on the first Sunday after the end of their last month. The catalog works that date out for you and shows it on the row.
| Badge | Means |
|---|---|
| blue Due off floor · 4 Oct 2026 | the artist is leaving. The date is when their work should be collected. It is still for sale until their membership month finishes. |
| amber Overdue off floor · 6 Sep 2026 | that date has passed and the piece is still on the wall. This is the one to act on. |
| grey Off the floor | already collected. Hover for who and when. |
Worked examples, so the rule is unambiguous:
- Membership ends Aug 2026 → the last day is Monday 31 August → collected Sunday 6 September.
- Membership ends Sep 2026 → the last day is Wednesday 30 September → collected Sunday 4 October.
If a month happens to end on a Sunday, the date is the following Sunday — the gallery does not walk the floor on the artist’s own last day.
A date is never “overdue” for somebody who has not actually left. An artist whose end month is the month you are in now is still a member; their work is still selling and their date is still in the future.
These dates are worked out, not stored
Nothing is written to the artwork. The catalog recalculates from the artist’s end date every time you open it, so the dates are always right, and correcting an artist’s end date corrects every one of their works immediately with no follow-up.
It also means no piece is ever marked as removed on your behalf. An overdue badge is a reminder that there is a job to do in the room. It is not a record that the job has been done, and it never becomes one by itself.
Finding the work to do
The gallery floor dropdown, beside the status filter, narrows the list:
- On the gallery floor — everything currently on the wall.
- Off the gallery floor — everything already collected.
- Overdue off the floor — the worklist. Departed artists’ pieces whose collection date has passed and which are still on the wall.
The filter is in the address bar, so a filtered list survives a refresh and can be sent to a colleague.
It is a separate control from the status dropdown on purpose: a piece can be Available and Overdue off the floor at the same time, so they are not alternatives.
The public site never sees any of this
Where a piece physically is, who moved it, and when it is due off the wall are all internal. None of it appears anywhere on the public site, and a piece that is off the floor but still recorded as Available stays listed — unlisting it would be floor state leaking into the storefront by the back door.
Printing a pick list
The Pick list button, at the top of the artwork list, downloads a PDF (pick-list.pdf) to print and carry round the gallery: every piece to collect, and where it hangs.
- For one artist — choose the artist in the artist filter first. The button then reads Pick list (this artist) and the sheet lists only that artist’s pieces. This is the departing-member round.
- For the whole floor — with All artists chosen, the sheet lists every piece on the floor.
The sheet is grouped by place, in each place’s Order number (lowest first; set it under Artwork Catalog → Places, see Places). Number your places in the order you walk the room and the list follows that route instead of sending you back and forth. Each row has a tick box, the SKU, the title, the artist and the status.
Within a place, pieces that have a pin on the floor plan (see Pinning a work to its spot on a long wall) come first, in the order they hang along the wall, each with where it is, for example West wall · near the Jewelry case. Pieces without a pin follow, by title.
What is on it:
- Every piece still on the gallery floor.
- A piece sold online is listed. It is sold but still on the wall, and collecting it is the next job.
What is not on it:
- Pieces already marked Off the floor.
- Archived pieces.
- A piece sold in store. The buyer took it home.
A piece with no place recorded is still listed, under No place recorded at the end of the sheet, never dropped. If an old free-text location was typed in for the piece, it is shown as Noted as: … to help you find it. A piece on a place you have retired is listed under that place, marked retired place.
Printing the list records nothing. It does not mark any piece off the floor. Once a piece is off the wall, record it on its row with 🖼 Remove from floor. The sheet cannot say who carried which piece, and the record has to.
The pick list is printed through Reports Manager. If your gallery does not have it turned on, a note saying so appears in place of the button. An owner or admin can turn it on under Extensions. Like the rest of the catalog, the pick list is for staff only and is never on the public site.