In October 2010, my wife told me about a garage sale that the friends of our local kindergarten were to set up in November.

They were going to collect stuff from several people (assigning each a "vendor number" in the process), and present it for sale at the parish hall. Each item would be labeled with the vendor number on the price tag. They would cash in the money, and note down the price and the vendor number, so at the end, each vendor could be payed out (minus a percentage in benefit of the kindergarten).

Their original plan was to "do it somehow in Excel".

I offered to write a purpose-built script for them, and it turned out a bit fancier than I originally pictured it.

I might even polish it into general usefulness at some later point. (Right now, several things are hardcoded, making the script depending on a Gnome / Linux box and having a hardcoded output.)