5 Weeks to Go Checklist

1. Have You Set Up Your Credit Card Account?

2. Have You Procured Hardware for the Event?

3. Have You Combined Items Into Lots?
Before you generate bid sheets, you can combine items into Lots to maximize their value.

4. It's Time To Lay Out Items And Assign Final Item Numbers
You can organize your items by using Tables. Although the Table function focuses on silent auction items, it can also be used to make sure your non-silent items have the numbers you want. Here's the default schema that you can reorder or rename:
Table 1 (Item numbers 1-99): Live Auction Items
Table 100 (Item Numbers 100-199): Silent Auction Items
Table 200 (Item Numbers 200-299): Silent Auction Items
Table 800 (Item Numbers 800-899): Sellable Items
Table 900 (Item Numbers 900-974): Signup Parties
Table 975 (Item Numbers 975-999): Raffle Tickets
Table 1000 (Item Numbers 1000-1099 ): Ad Sales/Bequests/Donations
At the auctions we run (yes, at least half of us are chairing auctions this year ourselves), we generally don't assign numbers 400-699 to items - instead, we assign those as bidder numbers. That helps keep things straight in the heat of the evening.

5. It's Time To Preview Your Print Materials
As you entered items, you probably clicked on some of the Preview Bid & Description Sheet links that appear on each item page when you are logged in. But now that you have everything entered, grouped into lots, and ordered, you should take a look at how your bid and description sheets will look, along with a draft Catalog in Word.