Camber & Finch Auctioneers
A fictional fine-art and antiques auction house, showing the full system an auctioneer can have: every winning lot invoiced with buyer’s premium, paid by branded link, and matched back to its bidder automatically.
Where the Time Was Going
A fictional business, drawn from a real and common shape — and the payment admin it was carrying.
Hundreds of winning buyers after every sale, paying by transfer matched to a bidder number by hand or card details read down the phone — and nothing ships until each one is found.
Camber & Finch is a fictional fine-art, antiques and collectables auction house — country-house sales, jewellery, silver and pictures. After each sale, hundreds of winning buyers owe an invoice of hammer price plus buyer’s premium. Historically they paid by bank transfer (matched by hand against a bidder number) or read card details down the phone to the saleroom office. The week after every sale was a reconciliation marathon, and nothing could be released or shipped until a payment was found and matched.
- Hundreds of invoices to settle and match by hand against bidder numbers after every sale — days of post-sale admin per auction
- Card details over the phone are the riskiest way to take payment — remote-purchase fraud cost the UK nearly £400m in 2024 (UK Finance) — and they pull the saleroom phone line into PCI scope
- Overseas buyers (a big share of fine-art bidding) struggled to pay — international transfers were slow and arrived with mangled references
- Lots couldn’t be released or shipped until payment was matched, so staff time went on chasing and checking instead of cataloguing the next sale
Try the Interactive Demo
A working page in the Camber & Finch Auctioneers branding — a fictional brand, running in test mode only.
Pay Your Invoice
Payment Received
Camber & Finch Auctioneers is a fictional brand created for this demonstration — it is not a SettlePay client and no real payments are taken.
From Payment Page to Payment System
The page is the visible part. The build is everything that stops payments needing to be chased, matched and remembered.
- A branded post-sale "Pay Your Invoice" page (the demo below)
- Buyer’s premium and VAT calculated and shown correctly per lot
- A pay-by-link sent automatically to each winning bidder after the sale
- Payments auto-matched to the bidder and lot, so it can be marked ready to release
- A settlement board: who’s paid, what’s outstanding, what’s ready to ship
- Automatic reminders for unpaid invoices, in the auction house’s own voice
Choose a StoryPick a customer to follow their payment end to end — every screen below is simulated, no real money moves.
This sale: 316 of 412 invoices settled, every payment matched to its lot automatically.
Every lot, every invoice and its live status — matched to the lot automatically, reminders sending themselves. No settlement spreadsheet.
A simulated, user-controlled walkthrough — pick a customer to follow their payment end to end, or open The Board to see the week at a glance. Fictional data and simulated system connections; nothing plays until you choose.
What We Could Realistically Touch
An honest map of the existing setup — because what a third-party developer can and cannot access decides what should be promised.
Already in Place
- A saleroom management system for cataloguing, bidding and invoicing
- A website with online bidding
- The auction house’s own bank account
What We Worked With
- Invoice, lot and bidder references via the saleroom system’s API (where one exists) — or a per-sale export where it doesn’t
- The auctioneer’s own processor account — settlement straight to the auction house
- Buyer contact details already captured at registration
What Stayed Untouched
- The saleroom / catalogue system itself — we work alongside it, not inside it
- Consignor accounts and valuations — never touched by the payment layer
- Buyer data beyond the reference and amount needed to take and match a payment
Auction software varies enormously: some platforms expose a clean API (we connect and reconcile automatically), others are closed (we run the branded pay-by-link and match against an exported bidder reference). We scope to what the specific system allows — this illustrative build shows the fuller, API-connected version. Unlike a real client whose build was a payment page only, this is a what-could-be demonstration.
What That Adds Up To, Honestly
Quantified from published UK industry figures — and labelled as the model it is, not passed off as a client result.
The week-long matching marathon becomes a settlement board that has already matched each payment to its lot.
A tap on a branded link replaces slow international transfers with mangled references — lots clear and ship sooner.
The saleroom office leaves the riskiest category of UK card fraud behind, and the phone line leaves PCI scope.
How These Figures Are Modelled
- A modelled fine-art auctioneer running ~20 sales a year with several hundred paying buyers each — illustrative volumes, not a real client.
- Remote purchase (card-not-present) fraud: just under £400 million lost in 2024, the largest category of UK card fraud — UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025. A hosted page also keeps card data out of the saleroom, with PCI handled by the processor.
- No published figure exists for auction-house reconciliation time, so the post-sale admin saving is stated as a modelled assumption, not a measured result.
Like the business itself, these figures are illustrative: a scenario modelled on published UK industry averages, not measured results from a real client. Your own numbers will depend on your volumes and on how you get paid today.
Now Try It on Your Own Numbers
Drag the sliders — or type your own figures — and the savings recompute live, costed against the same UK data. The model fits any scale, from a sole trader to a saleroom settling thousands a month.
And lots clear faster: overseas buyers pay by card the moment the sale ends, so items can be released and shipped without waiting days for a transfer to arrive and be matched.
A model, not a measured result: your admin hourly rate and time-per-item are yours to set, costed against published UK figures. Your own savings depend on your volumes and how you get paid today.
Curious what this would recover in your own business?
How It Connects
Behind the page, every payment carries its reference — an invoice number, tenancy, lot or mandate — so it is matched back to the business's records automatically, reminders go out on schedule instead of from someone's evening to-do list, and the books update themselves. Funds settle directly from the processor to the business's own bank account; SettlePay never holds funds. Payments are processed by FCA-regulated partners.
What Would This Look Like on Your Numbers?
Tell us how you get paid today — bank transfers, cheques, card numbers over the phone — and what systems you already run. We'll map what we could realistically automate for you, and what it would save.