Product

Buy it, get it ready, sell it, learn from it

Inventory and profit tracking for businesses that buy, make, and sell. Five stations, and an item that walks through them carrying its own cost — a flipper skips Make, a maker uses all five, a warehouse works Prepare as a station of its own. Same product, same data.

Starting from what you already have

Nobody types four hundred items in by hand. Whatever your catalog lives in today, it comes across — and it arrives as purchases with costs on them, not as a bare list of names.

The spreadsheet you already keep

Export it as a CSV, drop it on the import page, and match your columns to Intakes’ fields. You are shown exactly what it will do before it does anything.

Each row becomes an item and a line on a draft purchase — one per date and supplier in the sheet — so the stock arrives with what you paid for it.
Every problem is listed at once, by row and column, rather than one error at a time.
Nothing is opened until you look it over, and re-importing the same sheet adds nothing: rows match on SKU, then on name.

The shop you already sell from

Connect an eBay or Etsy account and turn its listings into catalog records — one listing, or the whole shop in one go.

A listing with variations becomes an item family, with a member per variation and the names composed for you.
Your own words are reused: a Size attribute you already have is the one it uses, and only what is genuinely new is created.
Each item starts with the listing’s own photograph, copied into your storage so it survives the listing ending.

What makes it different

The parts other inventory tools skip

Mixed-lot costing

Sell before you have finished counting

A storage unit, a reseller pallet, an estate lot — one price for a pile of unknown stuff. Record it as one purchase, start unpacking and listing in batches, and close it when you are done.

The price spreads fairly across everything you found — including what already sold.
Until then, profit is marked provisional rather than guessed.
Staged deliveries land on the same purchase, so the bank reconciles once.

The whole mixed-lot story

An open intake's totals: a $46 buyer's premium recorded, a $506 purchase total, and the difference marked $460 short while the items are still being counted.

The items of an open intake for a storage unit bought at one price: twenty-six added so far, one at a time as they are unpacked, none with a cost on it yet.

A closed intake's totals: a $310 subtotal plus a $31 buyer's premium, a calculated total of $341 that matches the purchase total.

True landed cost per item

Every cost, in the unit

Cost is captured at purchase and carried at the finest grain — the individual piece. Freight and fees are spread by weight; packaging is counted into the sale it shipped in.

Margin on an item that ships in a $2 box is told the truth.
Damaged and lost stock keeps its cost, so a write-off is valued, not shrugged at.
Reopen a purchase to add a forgotten fee and every affected figure recalculates.

A closed intake's items: each line's unit cost of $11.08 beside its final cost of $12.19 once the buyer's premium is spread across the purchase.

Units and lots

One by one, or by quantity — side by side

A jacket is a unit: tracked on its own, with its own cost and optionally a serial number, so you can always point at that one. Five hundred mailer boxes and forty yards of fleece are lots: a quantity, because any one will do and what matters is how much is left. The question is never whether something is counted or measured; it is whether you will ever need to tell one from another. Both live on the same purchase, and a lot can be split, merged and transferred without losing a cent of cost history.

Creating an item asks two plain questions — what it is counted or measured in, and whether one piece ever needs telling from another — and never makes you choose between two kinds of record.
A quantity is stated in its own unit — yards, grams, pieces — and every figure says so, so it is never a bare number you have to remember the meaning of.
Serial numbers where the goods carry them, and nothing to fill in where they do not.
Returns recorded as what they are: goods back in, money back out, in the month it happened.

Inventory health for a resale shop, counted in units: 16 received and waiting, 216 available, 3 reserved on sales and 1,030 sold.

Inventory health for a candle maker, counted in lots: 66 received across 6 lots, 685 available across 57 lots, 29 reserved and 4,511 sold.

Coconut Soy Melt Wax, a lot-tracked material counted in pounds: its lots with their quantities, costs and storage location, one still available with 12.2 lb and the rest used up.

Item families, variants and their recipes

Fifty variants of one product, stated once

Sizes, colours, sleeve types, body cuts — your own axes, with the values in the order you put them in. An item family declares which axes its product varies along, and a matrix mints the whole grid in one act, composing each member’s name from the family and its values.

Up to a thousand members at once — and widening the family later opens on the grid as it stands, with everything that already exists checked, so you add the one new colour and nothing else.
Every member is a real item with its own stock, cost and place in every report, which is what makes “which sizes never move” a question with an answer.
A family recipe states the whole family’s recipes on one grid — a row per member, a column per ingredient. Narrow it to olive and set the fabric for every olive member at once; type only the yardages that actually differ. Each row is saved as that member’s own recipe.
Search, filters and the sales breakdown all understand the axes — everything in olive, margin by size, and a rollup of how the product did variant by variant.

How attributes and families are laid out

A family recipe for a soy candle item family: one row per scent and size, one column per ingredient — wax, fragrance oil, wick, jar and lid — with each member's yield and amounts.

Production and recipes

Recipes define, work orders execute

Buy your materials like anything else, then run a work order that consumes them. The recipe holds the standing formula — what one batch is made from and how much it yields — and pre-fills the run. What actually happens on the bench is what gets costed.

Record output as it comes off the line — three today, four tomorrow, sellable straight away.
Each product carries its own recipe's materials, so unrelated goods in one run never blur each other's margins.
Machine time, kiln firing, a subcontracted step — cost a run in your own words, and report on it by that name.
The sale can come first: one click on it works out what you are short of and plans the run to fill it — and offers to reserve the sale the moment that run closes.
State a whole family’s recipes on one grid, and plan the week on a board — two olive sweaters Wednesday, three Friday — with what was made filling in as you record it.

A closed work order's totals: $1,238.46 of input cost, labour and overhead added as adjustments, and a total cost of $1,663.96.

A card on the schedule board: 18 of 36 Soy Candle Cedar & Smoke 8 oz produced for Work Order #96, due by October 9.

The production schedule board, full screen: next week's pour in a column per day, each listing the materials that day's work draws and a card per candle to make, with a fragrance oil marked short before the pour starts.

An Etsy order's totals: what the buyer paid, then what the marketplace took, line by line — transaction fee, shipping transaction fee, listing fee, payment processing fee and shipping label.

Marketplace connections

Your eBay and Etsy orders, fees and all

Connect an account and your listings and orders come in on their own. Each order is priced exactly as the marketplace priced it, and every fee it charged lands on the sale by name — so profit on a marketplace sale is as true as profit on one you typed yourself.

Orders arrive within the quarter hour and wait for you to turn them into sales — or record themselves, if you tell them to.
A sale will not complete while it records less than the marketplace says it charged, so a fee that posts days after the parcel is never quietly lost.
Your listings mirrored — what is up, at what price, with what is left — and one page adding them up against your stock so you never over-promise.
A listing only gets a couple of variation slots, so the rest of what a buyer picks is a checkout question. Say which item family the listing sells and what each answer means — once, per attribute, not per row — and every order lands on the exact variant, cuff sleeve and all.
Read-only: Intakes reads your shop and never changes it. Publishing and cross-listing from Intakes are on the way.

An Etsy order line as the marketplace stated it: the listing, the fragrance and size the buyer chose, and a gift message recorded as not changing the item.

How an Etsy listing maps to a candle item family: no checkout answer changes the item, the listing sells the Soy Candle family, and each of its fragrance variations is matched to a scent by name.

eBay and Etsy today; Shopify and Amazon next. Intakes is an independent product, and is not endorsed or certified by any marketplace it connects to.

Work queue, locations and the team

Nothing left to remember, and nothing left to find

Every state where stock or cost is mid-flight is counted, with the next step named — and the things you could not have noticed for yourself come and find you. Every shelf says what is standing on it right now, and every piece keeps its own location history.

The work queue: one unreconciled intake, one open intake, 16 received stock to prepare, three listings over what is held, and three reserved sales — each a row with its count and next step.

The work queue, and the app telling you

What needs a person, counted — and said out loud

Received stock waiting to be prepared, purchases waiting to be closed, marketplace orders waiting to become sales, runs past the day they were promised, totals that do not add up. Each one is a row with a count, grouped by the station it belongs to, and each row opens exactly the list it counted. A row with nothing in it goes quiet; a row that needs you says what to do next — and only a figure that disagrees with something turns amber.

Set a low stock figure on anything you restock — five sweaters, four yards of thread, or zero for “tell me when it is gone” — and Intakes says so within the hour of your stock reaching it.
It counts the stock you can actually sell: goods already promised to a buyer are not in the figure, goods waiting to be shelved are. And it tells you once, then re-arms itself when you restock, rather than nagging daily.
Notices reach you three ways — the bell in the app, one email carrying everything waiting rather than one per item, and a real notification on your phone.

Storage locations and relocations

Every piece knows its shelf — and how it got there

Stock is placed when it is prepared, and moved afterwards by a relocation — who moved it, when, where to, and why. It never touches a bucket or a cost; it only answers where the goods are.

Move one piece from its own page, or take a whole filtered selection — a delivery, an aisle, everything on one shelf — and shift it in one go, recorded as a single relocation.
A location says what is standing on it now — units and lots — not everything that ever passed through it, and the count opens that exact list.
A Location History page reads it both ways: every move as it happened, or grouped into the relocations that made them.
Bin 2 comes before Bin 10, because shelves are sorted the way people write them — and a shelf that still holds pickable stock refuses to be archived.

A unit's page: a Pendleton jacket with its cost, the intake it came from and its storage location, and an activity trail of where it has been moved and when.

Roles, a team, and the record

Roles and per-feature permissions: who may prepare, sell, write off, close a purchase — and who may only read.
No per-seat charges, so a team of six pays what a team of one pays and nobody shares a login.
Stock reserved the moment a sale is agreed, so the same piece can never sell twice.
Bulk actions cover the whole filtered list, not the page you can see — and tell you the count before they act.

On the floor, on a phone

Add Intakes to your phone’s home screen and it opens like any other app — no app store, and never a version behind, because it is always the one we shipped last.
Real notifications on the lock screen, with a badge on the icon, so an order arriving reaches you while Intakes is closed.
The entry grids fold into one card per row on a small screen, so recording a delivery in the stockroom is the same job as at the desk.
Once it is installed, pull down to refresh — exactly where your thumb expects it, since there is no browser bar to reach for.

The dashboard on a phone: sales, buyer total, profit and margin tiles over the work queue.

The production schedule on a phone, one day at a time, with the work not yet scheduled above it.

An Etsy order on a phone: its status, buyer, ship-by and delivery dates, and the tracking number.

Reports and profit

Profit you can read three ways, and it agrees with itself

By item, by sale, by channel, by source, by size or color. A profit & loss statement whose profit line is the dashboard's to the cent — with returns and write-offs on their own lines below it, never hidden inside it.

Profit by source

Which thrift store, flea market or auction actually makes you money

Every piece you sell is traced back to the purchase it came from, so the sales breakdown can rank where you buy by what it earned — revenue and margin rate side by side. No tool without a true cost per piece can answer it. When one sale mixes pieces from two places, it is split between them piece by piece, and the tab still adds up to the same total as every other view of the same sales.

The sales breakdown by source for this year: Outlet Bins, estate sales, storage unit auctions, rag house bales and Facebook Marketplace ranked by revenue, each with its margin rate, units sold and share.

Profit & loss

A P&L that matches the dashboard to the cent

For any period: revenue, cost of sales with the packaging in it, gross profit, every fee, and profit — the same profit the dashboard shows. Everything that was not a sale sits on its own lines below it, never folded into it.

Each fee by the name you gave it, with how many sales it was used on — so the shipping you charge sits a few lines above the shipping you pay.
Returns in the month they happened, with the goods’ cost credited back because they came back into stock.
Stock written off to damage and loss, at what it actually cost.
Your running costs and mileage at the end, down to net profit.

A full year's profit and loss statement: revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, seller adjustments by type and profit, then returns, write-offs and operating expenses down to net profit.

The check nobody else does

Cost of goods, worked out two ways

Once from your stock — what you held at the start, plus what came in, less what you hold at the end — and once from your sales. A spreadsheet cannot make this check, because it has no record of what moved.

Every difference is named: a sale dated December 30 but completed January 2, sales from before stock movements were recorded.
What is left is rounding, or something worth a look before anything is filed — and the page says which.

Expenses and mileage

The running costs on the same books — and every drive says what it bought

Software, the storage unit, a phone bill, the parking at an estate sale: each is an expense with its receipt attached, sorted into your own categories. Log a trip and it is valued at the IRS standard mileage rate for its day — and linked to the purchases you made on it.

Logging a trip offers the purchases recorded that day, already checked, so the mileage log says what every drive was for.
Money a vendor pays back is a refund in the month it arrived, never an edit that rewrites a month you already filed.
Each category is placed once on its Schedule C line, and marketplace fees can be too.
Outside the US, trips are logged by distance alone, with nothing converted into a rate that does not apply.

A trip's purchases: Intake #158 from estate sales on October 2, closed, $42.99 — the purchase that drive produced.

An expense's refunds: $44.99 paid back by Photoroom in June as Expense #137, leaving $45.00 net.

And the ones your accountant asks for

The year-end packet puts your records on Schedule C as far as they reach — gross receipts, cost of goods, every expense and mile on the line you placed it on — as a PDF or a spreadsheet. The figures, not a filled-in return and not tax advice.

Inventory valuation for any day you pick — what you held at the close of December 31, at cost. Run it in March and still get December 31.
Bestsellers ranked by revenue, margin or sales, with the things that never sold listed rather than left out.
Slow stock ranked by days of cover — how long today’s pile lasts at its current pace.
What your purchases and runs were charged beside the goods — freight, duty, machine time — each by the name you gave it.
A sales rollup per item family, and the margin sitting in stock between what it cost and what it would sell for.
Any list, exported as a spreadsheet from the list itself — the rows your filters narrowed to, in the order you sorted them.

The Schedule C section of the year-end packet: gross receipts, returns, cost of goods sold and gross income, then each expense line of Part II with what was placed on it.

Corrections and audit history

Mistakes have clean exits

Real operations mis-count, mis-type, and change their minds. Every document has an honest way back, and nothing rewrites history silently.

Reopen a closed purchase to fix a forgotten fee — costs recalculate everywhere, even on sold items.
Un-complete a sale to fix it. Pull a prepared batch back.
Write off damage with a reason; the loss keeps its cost, so it is a real number.
Who did what, when, on every purchase, sale and item — and one workspace-wide feed. Nobody writes it down.

An intake's history: drafted, items added, opened, adjustments updated — opened to show the 10% buyer's premium that was added — an attachment added, the cost spread and the intake closed, each with who and when.

Know what you really made on every sale.

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