Guide · 6 min read

How to track inventory for a craft business (without losing your weekend)

Updated July 2026 · by the makers of StashQ

Every maker's inventory system starts the same way: you just… remember. Then one Saturday someone buys three of something at a fair, your whiteboard is at home in the garage, and Monday you're promising a wholesale order you may not be able to fill. This guide is the system that replaces remembering.

The three numbers that actually matter

Fancy systems track dozens of fields. A craft business runs on three:

1. On hand — how many finished units exist right now, wherever they are (shelf, bin, car trunk).
2. Reorder point — the stock level at which you must start making more, based on how fast it sells and how long a batch takes. If a candle takes a week of cure time and sells 5/week, your reorder point is at least 5 — not zero.
3. True unit cost — materials plus your time plus overhead. It's the number that turns "I sold a lot" into "I made money." (Our free pricing calculator computes it.)

Level 1: the notebook (fine until it isn't)

One page per product, tally marks in and out. Honest advice: this works for under ~10 products with one sales channel. Its fatal flaw is that it's never with you at the moment of sale — which is exactly when the count changes.

Level 2: the spreadsheet

A column each for on-hand, reorder point, cost, price. This is a genuine upgrade, and plenty of six-figure makers ran on one for years. Three cracks appear with growth:

• It doesn't decrement itself. Every market day ends with an hour of reconciling what sold against what the sheet says.
• It can't alert you. A reorder point you have to remember to check isn't a reorder point; it's a wish.
• It doesn't know your customers. The "sarah?? $35 — 2 candles + soap" IOU lives in a different app, which is how IOUs get forgotten.

Level 3: software that decrements itself

The graduation moment is when recording the sale updates the stock — one action instead of two. From there, everything downstream gets honest: low-stock alerts fire themselves, cost recipes keep margins true when supply prices move, and market-day sales sync from your phone (even offline) instead of waiting for Sunday-night data entry.

That's the whole thesis behind StashQ — inventory, sales, customers, and IOUs in one place, free for your first 50 orders each month. But whichever tool you pick, the test is the same: does selling one candle update one system, or three?

The mistakes that quietly cost money

• Counting materials but not finished goods (or vice versa). You need the finished number to sell; the material number to make.
• No cost on custom orders. One-off commissions skip the recipe and end up priced on vibes — usually low.
• Treating fairs as untracked. Cash sales that never hit the system make your bestseller invisible in your own data.
• Zero as the reorder point. By the time you're at zero, you're already losing the next two weeks of sales to cure/dry/ship time.