Introduction to Craftybase

Products

Our first tutorial is all about products - the things you make to sell to your customers. If you have connected a sales channel, you'll notice that most of the work has been done for you, however it's still a good idea to be aware of how products fit into the system so you can adapt them to match the way you want to track your stock.

Materials

Materials are the raw ingredients that you use up in order to create your products. Materials by themselves don't really do much other than hold basic information about prices and stock levels, but when you add them to recipes and use them in manufactures this is where the magic happens: you'll instantly start to see exactly how much you use and thus exactly how much your products cost you to make.

Adjustments

Once you have the idea of products and materials, the next step is to understand how stock is managed and calculated in Craftybase - this is done via a concept called Adjustments.

Recipes

Recipes are essentially saved lists of the materials and amounts you use to produce your handmade products. Although not essential, they can be a real timesaver if you create the same products again and again (if you make mainly custom pieces, you might like to skip this one for now and go on to the Manufactures tutorial)

Manufactures

Manufactures record the creation of your products and increase your project stock on hand while calculating the numbers you need for your COGS. The materials you have used to produce your product will be from the recipe you created yesterday - this will automatically decrease your material stock by the amounts you have used and calculate your exact cost of production.

Material Expenses

Material expenses in Craftybase are just like regular expenses in traditional accounting programs but with a twist: they allow you to link directly to the material you have just purchased. In doing so, you can track your expenses, increase your material stock on hand AND recalculate actual rolling average unit prices all at the same time (imagine trying to do all that in Excel!)

Orders

Let's now track your product sales! An order is a group of products you sell to a customer on a specific date. Once an order has been added for a project or variation, your available stock on hand is decreased automatically by the order quantity. Orders can be manually entered, or imported via your connected sales channels (or a combination of both if you wish).

Variations

Want to know how to track minor differences in products like sizes and colours without creating a whole lot of projects? The answer is variations! Craftybase supports manual creation and importing from several different sales channel sources, we explain how all works in this tutorial.

Components

Components can be really useful for situations where a in process material is created as a batch before being used up between a number of products. A Component is a special type of Project that when manufactured, increases stock of a material rather than stock of a product for sale.

Consignment

If you sell via consignees, you'll be wanting to track your stock accurately while out at your external locations. Our tutorial will guide you through how to handle consignment via Craftybase using Locations and Transfers.

Stocktaking

Stocktaking is essentially the act of physically counting your material and product stock. In doing this regularily, you'll be able to see your exact stock on hand and identify any issues with your production processes.

Compliance

Learn how our compliance features allow you to track your products from purchase of material through to sale.

Product Bundling

Tracking products sold as sets requires a specific structure in Craftybase. Our tutorial covers structuring your products for these situations along with some tips on how to automate this process.

Pricing Guidance

This tutorial shows you how the pricing guidance is calculated and how to configure both your pricing tiers and price points.

Have some questions?

If you have any additional questions, please get in touch and we'll be happy to give you a hand. Alternatively, feel free to join and post your question in our official Craftybase Facebook group.