How to Use Bean Counter in Auctioneer

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

I've been emailed quite a bit recently with questions about auctioneer's handy little tool: Bean Counter. Today's post is meant to be an answer to the what, why and how questions asked about Bean Counter.

What is Bean Counter?

Every time you sell items or more importantly fail to sell items in world of warcraft, Bean Counter is there to track the transactions. It is a part of Auctioneer and the last tab on your auction house user interface if you have the addon installed.

Why Use Bean Counter?

You can view the information Bean Counter gathers in order to decide how many items you would like to post. In most cases when I start selling in a new market I am clueless as to how many will sell on any particular day. I'm also unaware of my competition and how they will react to various pricing methods. Bean Counter allows me to look at the dates I have posted items and see how many sold as well as how many came back. If every Monday I post 10 items and 8 come back, I know that I should really only be posting two at that price or I should be posting the same amount at a lower value. If I post 10 items and all sell then I had better increase either my price with the same number of items or increase the number of items I'm selling.
I'm sure now you're starting to realize why this addon is so powerful!

How to Use Bean Counter

Bean Counter works a lot like the appraiser tab in that you need to drag an item into the item slot on the left side of the UI in order for Bean Counter to look up the relevant data on the item in question. You can also shift click an item in trade chat just like the snatch list. This is why you sometimes see auctioneer talking in /say with nothing more than an item listed. They are doing that as a way to shift click on the text and then populate the Bean Counter or Snatch list tab since they don't have any of the items in their inventory at the moment.

Sorting is just like any other part of auctioneer, just left click on a column to sort and click again to change between ascending or descending.

There are some more advanced features for Bean Counter like changing the date display method (you could for example show the day of the week instead of a number) and you can play around with these if you'd like. %c is the default if you screw up and would like to go back to the way it was. You'll find all the configuration settings for Bean Counter by clicking on the red "Configuration" button at the top of the UI.

Bug in Bean Counter

I found that I was unable to scroll to the right of the UI in beancounter so I came up with a work around to be able to view all the fields, in particular the date field which by default starts off way to the right of the list of fields. Simply alt right click and drag to resize the column widths so that other columns start to squeeze in from the right side of the UI. Next you can shift right click to drag columns close to the left and then either resize them manually with alt right click and drag or press control + right click to set the column to it's default size.