Set up your gallery

GalleryCamp works best when you set up the structure first, then bring in the records. This guide takes you from an empty account to a gallery your team can use every day.

Before you begin

Gather these essentials:

• Your gallery name, logo, contact details, and default currency
• A list of staff who need access
• Your locations, including storage and off-site spaces
• A spreadsheet of artists, artworks, and collectors if you are migrating
• High-quality artwork images with clear filenames

A good first milestone: add one location, one artist, and five representative artworks. Walk through the complete workflow before importing the rest of your catalogue.

1. Complete your organization

Open Settings → Organization. Add your gallery's public details and confirm the default currency. This information becomes the foundation for inventory values, orders, and gallery documents.

If you manage more than one organization, use the gallery name at the top of the sidebar to switch between them. Records stay with the organization in which they were created.

2. Add your locations

Go to Settings → Locations and create every place where work may be held: your main gallery, a viewing space, storage, a fair booth, or an off-site loan location.

Use location names your entire team will recognize. “Back storage” is more useful than “Room 2” when someone is trying to find a work quickly.

3. Invite your team

Open Settings → Team to invite colleagues. Ask each person to use their own account rather than sharing credentials. Individual accounts make collaboration safer and keep record activity understandable.

Before inviting everyone, decide who owns these routines:

• Adding and checking artwork records
• Responding to inquiries
• Preparing orders and recording payments
• Publishing viewing rooms and website content
• Reviewing reports

4. Build the catalogue

Start with artists, then artworks. This makes artist assignment faster and prevents duplicate names.

For a small catalogue, choose Inventory → Artists → Add Artist, followed by Inventory → Artworks → Add Artwork. For a migration, use the Import option from the Artists or Artworks page.

Read Manage artwork inventory before a large import so your team agrees on statuses, price visibility, naming, and images.

5. Add collector records

Open Sales → Customers to add active collectors and professional contacts. Email is the required identifier; names, phone, address, tags, and internal notes make each relationship more useful.

Only import information your gallery needs and has a reason to retain. Collector records are operational records, not a general mailing-list dump.

6. Test a complete workflow

Use a test collector address and run this sequence:

1. Create an available artwork with an image and price.
2. Create a customer.
3. Build a private viewing room with that artwork.
4. Create a draft order and review its totals.
5. Open the collector-facing links on a phone and a laptop.
6. Confirm what is public, what is private, and what remains internal.

Your first-week checklist

• Organization name and currency are correct
• Locations reflect where work is actually stored
• Every staff member has an individual login
• Artists are de-duplicated
• Artwork statuses and prices have been reviewed
• A viewing room has been tested as a collector
• A draft order has been checked from end to end
• Your team knows who handles inquiries and payments

Once this is complete, the dashboard becomes genuinely useful: it can summarize inventory, recent activity, collector interest, and sales without relying on a parallel spreadsheet.