Inventory Management Tips and Tricks for Makers — 6 Ways to Save Time

When you first thought about starting your small business, you probably didn’t picture yourself spending hours managing inventory. Yet here you are — tracking raw materials, chasing stock levels, and wondering why admin keeps eating into the time you’d rather spend making things.

As soon as your business grows past selling to a handful of people you know, you find yourself spending as much time on inventory management as you do on actual production. I’m willing to bet that’s not what you signed up for.

The good news: most of that time drain is avoidable. These six inventory management tips won’t just shave minutes off your week — they’ll change how your whole operation runs.

Last updated: April 2026

What is inventory management and why does it matter for makers?

Don’t worry if you’re not totally sure what inventory management means — you’re almost certainly doing some version of it already, just without the label.

Inventory management covers everything you do to track and control your business’s stock: ordering raw materials, using materials in production, storing finished goods, and fulfilling customer orders. It manages the whole flow from raw material purchase through to sold product.

Without solid inventory management, you risk:

• Jumping between tasks because you don’t know what needs doing first
• Running out of key materials mid-production and making emergency purchases at retail prices
• Tying up working capital in excess stock that sits unused for months
• Spending hours on manual data entry that you then have to redo when something doesn’t add up
• Losing track of your true cost of goods sold, which means your pricing is probably off

When you nail your inventory management — even basic processes — you get time back, your margins improve, and you’re actually set up to scale without things falling apart.

Tip 1 — Buy smarter, not more often

Do you buy your raw materials as needed, ordering small amounts whenever you’re running low? Most makers do, especially early on. You can’t always predict which products will sell, and storage space at home is limited. These are fair reasons.

But buying in small, frequent amounts is usually a money-and-time leak. You pay higher per-unit prices, you spend more time placing orders, and you’re more likely to face stockouts when a supplier is temporarily out of stock.

If you have (or can create) the space, buying key materials in bulk makes a measurable difference. A candlemaker buying fragrance oils in smaller 4oz bottles versus 1lb or 4lb containers might pay 30–50% more per ounce. That gap compounds fast when fragrance is one of your highest material costs.

Before committing to bulk purchasing, though, you need to actually know your consumption rates. How many grams of fragrance do you use per candle? How many candles do you make per month on average? Without those numbers, bulk buying is just a guess. Once you have them, you can calculate how much to buy and when — which connects directly to the reorder point tip below.

If the idea of bulk purchasing still makes you nervous, that’s usually a sign you don’t yet have clear visibility into your stock levels. Good inventory tracking solves that.

Tip 2 — Stop using spreadsheets

Yes, I know. If you’re Type A, you love a good spreadsheet. But your spreadsheet is a time sink — and the more your business grows, the worse it gets.

It’s not about how pretty the spreadsheet is. The problems are structural:

Manual entry is slow and error-prone. Every order, every batch of production, every material purchase has to be typed in. Miss one entry and your numbers drift. Discover the error three weeks later and you’re re-checking every row trying to find where things went sideways.

Spreadsheets can’t do the maths that matters. They can add up quantities, but they can’t automatically calculate how much of each raw material you consumed when you manufactured 50 candles. They can’t deduct stock levels in real time as orders come in. They can’t generate a COGS figure you can hand to your accountant without hours of manual calculation first.

They don’t scale. When you’re selling one product on one platform, a spreadsheet is manageable. Add three more products, two sales channels, and some wholesale orders — and the spreadsheet that used to take 20 minutes a week now takes most of a morning.

No serious product business at any scale runs on spreadsheets for inventory. The sooner you make the switch, the less painful the migration. Inventory software like Craftybase brings all your stock data into one place — materials, recipes, finished goods, orders — and handles the maths automatically. The time you get back in a single week usually justifies the subscription cost many times over.

Tip 3 — Automate the boring stuff

Does anyone genuinely enjoy data entry? Stock counts? Manual order imports? Probably not. But most makers resign themselves to it because they assume it’s unavoidable.

A lot of it isn’t.

Inventory management software can handle almost anything that can be done digitally. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Automatic order importing — when an order comes in through Etsy or Shopify, it’s recorded in your inventory system without you touching anything. Stock levels adjust. Materials consumed are noted.
• COGS calculation — instead of totalling up material and labour costs manually at tax time, your software does it on an ongoing basis. When your accountant asks for your cost of goods sold, you pull a report rather than spending a weekend with a calculator.
• Low-stock alerts — instead of discovering you’ve run out of a key material when you’re about to start a production run, you get notified when stock dips below a threshold you set.
• Pricing checks — your software can flag when material cost increases mean your profit margins on a particular product have dropped below a healthy level.

Craftybase handles all of these — automatic order sync, real-time material deductions when you record manufacturing runs, COGS reporting, and material tracking. It won’t make you enjoy admin. But it will make most of it disappear.

Tip 4 — Know your stock levels in real time

This one sounds obvious, but most makers don’t actually have a live view of their stock. They have a rough idea — a mental estimate that’s partially based on a spreadsheet they haven’t updated in two weeks.

That gap between “rough idea” and “actual number” is where problems live.

Knowing your real stock levels means:

• You can fulfil orders confidently without scrambling to check whether you have enough materials
• You don’t make emergency trips to a craft store to buy materials at full retail price (often 2–3x what you’d pay through a wholesale supplier)
• You don’t over-order and tie up cash in materials that sit in your spare room for six months
• You can spot shrinkage — materials that are disappearing faster than your recipes account for, which usually signals measurement errors or waste

For makers selling across multiple channels — say, Etsy and your own Shopify store — real-time stock visibility becomes even more critical. Selling the same finished product on two platforms without synced inventory is how you end up with an order you can’t fulfil and a refund you didn’t budget for. Tools like Craftybase sync stock across channels so your available quantity stays accurate everywhere.

Setting reorder points for your materials is the next step up from basic stock visibility. A reorder point is the stock level that triggers a purchase order — calculated from your average daily consumption and your supplier’s lead time. We cover this in depth in the next tip.

Tip 5 — Set reorder points for your key materials

This is the tip that stops you from running out of materials mid-production. And yet most makers either don’t use reorder points at all, or they set them once and forget to revisit them as their business grows.

A reorder point is simple in principle: it’s the stock level that triggers a new purchase order, set high enough that your new stock arrives before you run out. The basic formula is:

Reorder point = (average daily usage × supplier lead time in days) + safety stock

Let’s say you’re a soap maker and you use 500g of lye per week on average — that’s roughly 71g per day. Your supplier takes 7 days to deliver. A reasonable safety stock for a critical ingredient might be 3–4 days’ worth, say 250g. Your reorder point would be:

(71g × 7 days) + 250g = 747g

When your lye stock dips to 747g, you place an order. The new stock arrives just as you’re dipping into your safety buffer. No stockout, no emergency panic-buying, no pausing production.

The numbers look different for every material and every business. High-volume materials with long supplier lead times need higher reorder points. Fast-moving materials with short lead times can be set lower. The key is that you’re making the decision based on your actual data — not gut feel.

Once you have reorder points set, Craftybase can alert you when a material hits that threshold. You don’t have to check manually. The system tells you when to order.

For more on the maths and worked examples, see our guide to the reorder point formula.

Tip 6 — Plan production in batches

If you’re making products one-at-a-time as orders come in, you’re almost certainly leaving efficiency on the table. Batch production — making multiples of the same product in a single run — is a proven way to get significantly more done in less time.

The time savings come from several places:

Setup time is amortised. Whether you’re making 5 or 50 candles, you have to weigh fragrance, melt wax, set up moulds, and clean up afterwards. Doing those setup and cleanup steps once for a batch of 50 instead of ten times for batches of 5 saves significant time.

Material purchasing is simpler. Batch planning lets you calculate exactly how much of each raw material you need for a week or month of production. That calculation feeds directly into smarter bulk purchasing (Tip 1) and keeps your reorder points accurate (Tip 5).

You reduce context-switching. Jumping between different products constantly is cognitively taxing and slows you down. Dedicating a production session to a single product — making a full batch of your bestselling soap bar, for example — keeps you in flow.

For batch production to work well, you need accurate recipe costing so you know exactly what each batch costs to make and whether your pricing still holds up. This is where manufacturing software earns its keep: Craftybase automatically deducts raw materials from your inventory when you record a production run, calculates the cost of each unit produced, and keeps your finished goods stock up to date — all without manual entry.

If you’re not sure where to start, pick your top-selling product and plan your next month’s production in two or three batches rather than making to order. Track the time difference. Most makers are surprised by how significant it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to start

Six tips is a lot to act on at once. Pick the one that matches your biggest current pain point:

• Running out of materials mid-production → Tip 5 (reorder points)
• Spending too long on manual data entry → Tip 3 (automation) and Tip 2 (drop the spreadsheet)
• Paying too much for materials → Tip 1 (bulk purchasing)
• Not sure what anything costs → Tip 4 (real stock levels) and Tip 6 (batch production)

All six of these work together — but you don’t have to do everything at once. One change, implemented properly, will save you more time than six half-measures.

If you’re ready to see what a proper inventory system looks like for a maker’s business, Craftybase offers a free trial. No warehouse experience required.