Ten Years of Binders — and Then a System She Actually Trusted
Amanda Nichols of Boreal Apothecary spent a decade evolving from paper records to Excel to physical binders. Nine years later, Craftybase is still the system she relies on.
Amanda Nichols of Boreal Apothecary spent a decade evolving from paper records to Excel to physical binders. Nine years later, Craftybase is still the system she relies on.
Meet Amanda.
Amanda Nichols has been making handmade bath and body products for over ten years. In the early days she tracked everything on paper: ingredients used, batches made, lot numbers written against each product so she could trace them if anything ever went wrong.
Then she moved to Excel. Then better Excel. Then binders full of printed records she had to physically store and search through by hand.
The problem wasn't discipline — it was scale. The more products she added, the more SKUs she tracked, the more variant batches needed lot numbers, the more the whole system threatened to collapse. And for a handmade bath and body business, those lot numbers weren't a nice-to-have. If a batch ever needed to be recalled, she needed that data immediately, from wherever she happened to be.
Being able to access everything from anywhere gives me peace of mind I didn't have before.
Outgrowing binders and spreadsheets? Get proper lot tracking built for makers.
Try Craftybase free for 14 daysAmanda searched for recipe tracking software. She tried QuickBooks — it couldn't handle recipes. She looked at SoapMaker 3 — it wasn't Mac-compatible. Craftybase was web-based, had proper recipe management, and tracked lot numbers. She switched.
That was 2016.
The paper binders are gone. Batches are logged digitally, with lot numbers tracked and searchable. Tax time means running a report, not reconstructing a spreadsheet. When a customer asks about a specific batch, she finds it in seconds.
For a one-person operation handling formulation, photography, wholesale accounts, and compliance on her own, that kind of reliability matters more than any single feature. Being able to log in from anywhere — not tethered to a binder on a shelf — means the records are always with her when she needs them.
She's still here, nine years later.
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Digital batch records, lot number tracking, and recipe management — built for makers who take compliance seriously.