inventory management
How to Track Packaging and Shipping Materials in Craftybase
Boxes, labels, tissue paper, poly mailers: they cost real money. Here's how to track packaging materials in Craftybase and get their cost into your COGS.
You track your raw materials. You track your finished products. But the box you ship them in? The label you print? The tissue paper, the thank-you card, the poly mailer?
Those cost money too. For many makers, packaging adds $0.50 to $2.00 per order once you add up every component. At 50 orders a month, that’s $25–$100 a month running quietly off the books.
This guide covers how to track packaging materials in Craftybase: the supported workflow (adding them as materials and including them in recipes), how to run manufacture to account for bulk packaging use, and one real limitation you should know about upfront.
What counts as a packaging material in Craftybase?
Anything that goes out with your product but isn’t the product itself.
Common examples:
- Shipping containers: boxes, poly mailers, padded envelopes, tubes
- Interior packaging: tissue paper, kraft paper, bubble wrap, foam inserts, packing peanuts
- Labelling and branding: product labels, thank-you cards, branded stickers, hang tags
- Closures and fasteners: tape, ribbon, twine, wax seals
- Protective elements: cellophane bags, shrink wrap, heat-seal bags
Craftybase treats all of these as materials, the same way it treats your soy wax, fragrance oil, or clay. The tracking approach is identical: add them to inventory, track quantities and costs, and include them in recipes so their cost rolls into your COGS per unit.
Step 1: Add packaging materials to your inventory
In Craftybase, go to Materials and add each packaging item as a new material entry.
A few tips for keeping your packaging materials organised:
Name them clearly. Use a consistent naming convention so they’re easy to find and filter. Something like “Packaging: Kraft Mailer 6x9” or “Packaging: Label, round 2in” keeps them grouped together in your materials list and makes it obvious what they are at a glance.
Set your purchase units accurately. Tape comes by the roll. Labels come by the sheet or by the roll of 100. Boxes come individually or by the pack. Set the purchase quantity to match how you actually buy them, then set a cost per unit. Craftybase will calculate your per-item cost automatically.
Use a Packaging category. Craftybase lets you assign categories to materials. Creating a dedicated “Packaging” category means you can filter your materials list to packaging only when you need to check stock levels, run reports, or place an order.
Set reorder points. Running out of boxes mid-order-run is its own kind of crisis. Set a reorder point for anything you ship regularly so Craftybase flags when stock is getting low. How to calculate reorder points covers the formula if you want to get this right.
Step 2: Include packaging materials in your recipe
Once your packaging materials are in inventory, add them to your product recipes.
Open a product recipe and add each packaging item as an ingredient, alongside your raw materials. Set the quantity to the amount you use per unit: one box per candle, one label per jar of lotion, half a sheet of tissue paper per order.
When you do this, the cost of packaging flows directly into your cost per unit. Your COGS calculation now includes the box as part of the cost of making (and shipping) each product. That’s the most important thing: packaging is part of your real cost, and the recipe is where it gets captured.
A few variations makers commonly encounter:
Products that share packaging. If you sell a candle in two sizes and both go into the same box, you can use the same packaging line in both recipes. If they use different boxes, create separate material entries.
Order-level packaging that applies to multiple items. A tissue paper wrap that covers the whole order, not just one item. The honest approach here is to divide it across your average order size. If a typical order has 3 items and one sheet of tissue paper ($0.15) covers the whole order, you can add $0.05 of tissue paper to each product recipe. It’s an approximation, but it’s closer to reality than leaving it out entirely.
Products that don’t ship in packaging. If you sell locally or at markets and customers take items without packaging, you can create a separate recipe variant without packaging materials, or just track packaging as a separate material entry outside of recipes.
Step 3: Run manufacture to consume packaging inventory
When you record a manufacture run in Craftybase, the system deducts all materials in that recipe from your inventory, including the packaging materials you’ve added.
This is where the tracking actually happens. A manufacture run of 50 candles using a recipe that includes one kraft box per candle will pull 50 boxes off your stock automatically. Your packaging inventory stays accurate without manual adjustments.
For makers who produce in batches (20 candles on Monday, another 30 on Wednesday), each manufacture run handles the deduction at the time you record it. By the end of the week, your packaging stock reflects what you’ve actually used.
A note on timing. The manufacture step in Craftybase represents when you make the product, not when you ship it. If you include packaging in the recipe, the stock deduction happens at manufacture time, not at the point of sale. For most makers this works well: you build your products, you pack them, you ship them. The manufacture and the packing happen close together.
If you pre-make stock and package it at a later point, you have a choice: include packaging in the manufacture recipe anyway (easier, some approximation involved), or track it via separate inventory adjustments when you actually pack orders. Either approach works. The recipe method is less friction.
Step 4: Track packaging separately from product materials (optional)
If you want a clear picture of packaging costs independently from raw material costs, a few approaches help:
Category-level reporting. With your packaging materials in a dedicated “Packaging” category, you can filter your materials spend to packaging only. This shows you how much you’re spending on packaging per period without having to dig through raw material costs.
Separate manufacture tracking. Some makers create a “Packaging run” as a distinct manufacture entry when they pack a batch of orders. This isn’t the default workflow, but it lets you track packaging consumption separately from the product manufacture step.
COGS breakdown. When you look at your cost per unit in Craftybase, you can see the recipe breakdown line by line: materials, packaging, labour. If packaging feels high relative to your product cost, this is where you spot it.
Knowing your per-unit packaging cost is useful when deciding whether to cut costs (can a smaller box work?), evaluate supplier changes (switching from retail to wholesale buying for boxes), or price differently for pickup orders versus shipped orders.
The kitting limitation — what Craftybase can and can’t do
This is worth being honest about.
The workflow above (packaging in the recipe, consumed at manufacture time) works well when you make products and pack them in the same step, or when your packaging is consistent per product.
What Craftybase does not currently support is kitting at the point of sale: assigning packaging to individual orders after the product is already made and sitting in inventory. Some makers need this: they pre-make 200 candles and store them unpacked, then pack each order individually with custom packaging based on what that specific customer ordered (gift wrap, personalised tags, different box sizes for different quantities).
In that workflow, the packaging needs to be linked to the order, not the manufacture. Craftybase’s model connects materials to manufacture runs, not to sales orders. You can track packaging in inventory and deduct it manually, but you can’t tie a specific box to a specific order automatically.
If per-order kitting is core to how you operate, this is a genuine limitation worth knowing before you invest heavily in setting up the workflow. The workarounds below help, but they don’t replicate true order-level kitting.
Workaround: create a “shipping kit” component
The most practical workaround for variable packaging is to create a component (a sub-recipe in Craftybase terminology) called something like “Standard Shipping Kit” or “Gift Box Kit.”
The kit contains all the packaging items for a typical order: one box, one sheet of tissue paper, one sticker, one thank-you card. When you pack orders, you run a small manufacture of the kit itself, which pulls those packaging materials off your inventory as a group.
You can have multiple kits for different order types: a standard kit, a gift kit with extra tissue and a ribbon, a wholesale kit with a different box. Recording which kit you “manufactured” for each batch of orders gives you reasonable tracking without per-order precision.
This works well for makers whose packaging is fairly consistent. It’s an approximation, but it keeps inventory accurate at the category level and gets packaging costs into your books.
Workaround: batch manufacture for order groups
A simpler option: record packaging as a separate manufacture entry that covers a batch of orders.
If you packed 25 orders on Tuesday, record a manufacture of “1x shipping kit × 25” or a simple entry that deducts the packaging materials for that batch. It takes 2–3 minutes and keeps your inventory counts current without per-order tracking.
The limitation is visibility: you can see that 25 orders’ worth of packaging went out that day, but you can’t trace which packaging went with which specific order. For most small makers, that level of detail isn’t necessary. For businesses that need full traceability to the individual order, a different system would be needed.
How packaging cost flows into your COGS
When packaging materials are included in your recipe and you run manufacture, the cost flows through to your COGS for handmade sellers automatically.
Your cost per unit includes:
- Raw materials (wax, fragrance, dye, etc.)
- Packaging materials (box, label, tissue)
- Labour (if you track time in the recipe)
- Any overhead allocation you’ve set up
That combined number is what Craftybase reports as your cost per unit. When you’re pricing products, you’re pricing against the full cost, not just the ingredients. When you run COGS reports at tax time, packaging is already in the figure.
The practical impact is real. A candle with $3.20 in raw materials might have $0.80 in packaging on top. Priced without that packaging cost, you’d be leaving $0.80 of expense unaccounted for in every sale. Across 500 units, that’s $400 in COGS that doesn’t show up where it should.
Getting packaging into your recipes is an underrated fix for most makers’ cost tracking setup. It’s not complicated: a few extra lines in a recipe. But it means your numbers reflect reality.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I track packaging materials separately from product materials in Craftybase?
Yes. Create a dedicated Packaging category in Craftybase and assign all packaging materials to it. You can then filter your materials list and spending reports by category to see packaging costs independently. They still flow into your COGS via recipes, but you can view them in isolation whenever you want a packaging-only breakdown.
Does packaging cost get included in COGS in Craftybase?
Yes, when you add packaging materials to your product recipe in Craftybase. Once they're in the recipe, the cost is included in your cost per unit and flows into your COGS reports automatically when you record manufacture runs. If packaging materials are tracked in inventory but not added to any recipe, their cost won't appear in COGS. It will just sit as materials spend without being allocated to products.
Can Craftybase assign packaging to individual orders at shipping time?
Not currently. Craftybase's model connects materials to manufacture runs, not to individual sales orders. This means you can track packaging inventory and include packaging costs in your COGS, but you can't automatically link a specific box or label to a specific customer order at the point of shipping. The workaround is to run a small "packaging kit" manufacture entry for each batch of orders you pack, which deducts the packaging materials as a group.
How do I handle packaging that varies by order size?
Create separate recipe variants or packaging kit components for different order sizes. For example, a "Small Box Kit" for single-item orders and a "Large Box Kit" for multi-item orders. When you pack a batch of orders, run a manufacture entry for each kit type based on how many of each you packed. It's an approximation, but it keeps your inventory accurate and your COGS closer to reality than treating all orders the same.
Should I include shipping labels and postage in my packaging materials?
Printed shipping labels (the label stock itself) can be tracked as a packaging material in Craftybase. Postage costs (what you pay to actually ship the order) are typically treated as a direct business expense rather than a product material cost. Many makers add a separate shipping line item to their pricing rather than baking it into COGS, since postage varies by destination and weight. Either approach is valid as long as you're consistent.
If tracking packaging costs is the piece you’ve been skipping, adding a few lines to your recipes is the fix. It takes about ten minutes to set up and from that point your cost-per-unit figures reflect what you’re actually spending to get products out the door.
Craftybase’s free trial gives you full access to materials, recipes, and manufacture tracking. Worth running through a product or two to see what your real costs look like.
