Knowing what your handmade product really costs: recipes, materials, and the number tax season asks for

Every maker eventually gets asked the same question, by a customer, a wholesale buyer, or a tax form: what does one of these cost you to make?

The honest answer has three parts — the materials that went into it, the share of the materials you bought in bulk and have not used up yet, and whatever you decide to count for your time and overhead. Most makers have a rough number in their head. Very few have one they could defend.

Here is how the tools makers reach for handle that question, and how Intakes approaches it.

The spreadsheet

Every maker has one: a materials tab with prices, a recipe tab that divides the bag of soda ash by the number of bars, a sales tab.

It works until the second batch. The next bag of soda ash costs a different price. You made 48 bars instead of 50. Some of the last bag is still in the cupboard. Now the “cost per bar” cell is a blend of guesses, and the profit you think you made on last month’s craft fair is off by an amount you cannot name.

Stocksmith, formerly Craftybase (and the maker-inventory category)

Stocksmith — Craftybase until its 2026 rename, same team and same software — is the established tool built for makers and small-batch producers: materials, recipes, batches, and the COGS figure. If you are looking at this category, look at it — it is a serious product with years behind it.

Where Intakes takes a different line:

• Cost is actual, per batch, from the materials that batch actually consumed — not a rolling average per material, which is what Stocksmith uses for its material and product costs. If the third bag of wax cost more, the candles poured from it cost more, and Intakes will tell you which ones.
• A purchase can stay open while you use it. Buy 100 yards of fleece for one price plus freight, start cutting, and close the purchase when it is fully counted. Anything made from it before then is marked provisional and settles to the real number the moment the purchase closes — nothing is guessed in the meantime.
• Made goods and bought goods live in one system. Many makers also resell — supplies, vintage, finished goods from others. Intakes tracks both on the same purchase and the same sale, with one cost model.
• Runs can be short, long, partial, or corrected. Planned 10, made 7? Finish it short and the plan stays on record beside what happened. Made a mistake? Reopen and reclose; every figure recalculates.

Where Stocksmith may fit you better today: sales channels. It pulls orders from Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, WooCommerce, Faire, Square, Wix and Squarespace, and pushes stock levels back to most of them, so a sale in one place lowers what the others offer. It also syncs with QuickBooks. Intakes reads orders and listings from eBay and Etsy today, writes nothing back to them yet, and has Shopify and Amazon still to come. If you sell across several of those shops and need their stock kept in step automatically, that matters more than anything else on this page. Compare on what you need this year.

Intakes, for a maker

The vocabulary is yours. A recipe says what one making of a product uses and what it yields. A work order is one actual run — it reserves the materials when you start, records what came off the line as it comes, and prices every finished piece from what that run really consumed plus whatever you add for labor or overhead. A product can have more than one recipe (sewn from fabric, or reworked from another finished piece), and a whole family of variants — sizes, colors — gets its recipes stated once.

Then those finished goods sell like anything else, and the profit on each sale subtracts the real cost — including the packaging it shipped in.

What you get at tax time: a year-end packet with inventory at the start and end of the year and a cost-of-goods figure worked out two ways — once from your stock and once from your sales — with any difference between them named. Record your running costs and mileage beside it, and a US business gets those figures placed on the lines of Schedule C. It is the figures, not a filed return and not tax advice. And an export of everything as spreadsheets whenever you want it.

Which one do you need?

Intakes has a free trial with no card up front. See the pricing page for the one plan and what it includes.