Market Discussions

As some people are aware, I'm currently working on a cross-platform asset management, accountancy and trading companion. I was toying with the idea upon my return to Eve in order to help my own trading activities, and after talking with some people from #eve-dev, I decided to go ahead with it.

This application will run natively on iOS, Android and will also be accessible via any HTML5 compatible web browser. It will be free of charge, have zero adverts... and generally be pretty awesome. I'm working on a feature roadmap at the moment, but you can see some screenshots of the live development version below.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, comments or feature requests - just let me know. If it's possible and feasible, I'm more than happy to include it.

http://bitterseatrading.com/files/app-screen-1.png
http://bitterseatrading.com/files/app-screen-3.png
http://bitterseatrading.com/files/app-screen-4.png

A public preview release will be available to use within the next 2 weeks.

Revenue does not equal profit. While most applications do recognize cash flow, few try to determine profit (revenue - expense). How do you handle calculating profit?

Perhaps I am just mislead by screenshots.

I've though about this problem myself and my thinking is the only solution that, of course imho, would work. Instead of automating Profit calculation allow the user to input their own price point. This would be a pain per transaction but perhaps this could be entered at the buy order database entry. Then any sales from that order updates price point or figures profit point or some such.

However the inevitable truth is that automated profit determination is not possible.

PS: Naughty Hexxx. Asking a loaded question like that.

II'll do you one better.

What you need to do is called cost accounting. It's tracking your inventory (determined by your purchase transactions) - breaking it down to the cost per unit. Your purchases in EVE are typically in lots of some quantity for a sum of ISK - when you sell something it may or may not exhaust that lot...and so a remaining quantity of any given lot must be tracked. It works out to constructing a table that looks something like this:


Inventory

---

Name
Date Bought
Price per Unit
Original Quantity
Remaining Quantity


Once you have that, you can prescribe to the FIFO method in accounting (first in, first out) and simply take the oldest lot of whatever that item is and use that as the cost basis for whatever it is that you sell. For example:

Inventory

---

Zydrine, 3/20/2012, 1500.00, 1000, 500
Zydrine, 3/21/2012, 700.00, 500, 500

If you then sold 1,000 Zydrine you would sell 500 @ a cost of 1500.00 per unit and 500 @ a cost of 700.00 per unit. This works out to a cost basis of 1,100 for the sales lot. If you sold that 1,000 Zydrine for 2,000 a unit you'd have a profit margin of 45% (profit divided by revenue).

Your sales table would have to calculate that out for each sales transaction based on your remanining inventory, but once you get it your good.

This works well for just tradining on the regular market. For manufacturing/research/contracts/etc it's quite a bit more complicated.

The ability to turn functions on and off and highly customize the app are one of the main developmental points I've thought about.

Forgot the

I'll be taking the advice from both of you under consideration, and will probably PM you in the near future to discuss things further (if that's okay). Beyond that, there's been a change of plans.

The web app version seems to have a far great interest, and as a result; I'll be working on that and getting it out first. You can expect a public preview in the next couple of days, and I'll be putting up development screenshots this afternoon and evening.

And here's the dashboard overview from the web app variant.

http://bitterseatrading.com/files/web-app-1.jpg

I'm tempted to give users the option to choose either for calculations.

Completely different tool :p.