How To Track Your Finished Items Inventory Using Spreadsheets

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Finished items inventory is this weeks topic. If you’ve been wondering how to track your inventory of finished items using spreadsheets, I’ll teach you how in this blog post.

Keeping track of inventory is tough. There are so many moving pieces that you need to keep track of.

• Materials and supplies that you buy and use
• Finished items as they are made and going out as they are sold
• Items that are out on consignment

Let’s start with a list of things that you might want to keep track of about the finished items you have in your inventory:

• Date you made the item (so you’ll know how long it’s been hanging around)
• When you sold the item (so you’ll know when to move the costs from Inventory into Cost of Goods Sold)
• The item name
• Detailed list of costs (so you’ll know which specific items and amounts you need to remove from your materials inventory)
• Total Cost (of all materials used)
• Cost of Items Sold (so that cost can be removed from Finished Items Inventory)
• Cost of Items removed due to theft or damages (think about going to a craft fair and someone walking away with an item OR something happens to that item to make it unsellable – so that can be deducted from the total value of your finished inventory)
• Cost of Items removed for personal use (so that can be deducted from the total value of your finished inventory)
• Cost of Items donated to charity (maybe something that’s been hanging around for a long time that you decide to donate to charity (so that can be deducted from the total value of your finished inventory)
• The running finished balance of your inventory (complete with all the ins & outs)
• Retail cost of materials (the cost to replace the items)
• How long it took you to make the finished item
• Your “fair” hourly wage (so you figure in the cost of your time)
• Overhead/Profit/Markup
• Your Sales Price (unless of course you want to keep that info in another spreadsheet)
• Any promotional or sales discount that you gave when you finally sold the item
• The actual income from the sale of the item

Quite the list isn’t it? And I’m sure there could be even more things that you might want to keep track of, but hey…..I’m only guessing at what information you might want all in one place.

By now I’m sure you’ve realized that I’m NOT a fan of spreasheets.

One spreadsheet leads to another, which leads to another. You get the drift. Pretty soon, around you go like a hamster in a spinning wheel of spreadsheets.

But I get it, you’re just starting out and:

• either money is tight
• you think software is too hard to learn
• and Google Sheets is FREE

I’m here to help. And even though I’m not a fan of spreadsheets, I’ve created one for you that covers all the things that you might want to track that I listed above.

This is what it looks like.

There are 20 columns of information that you can keep track of! Ya, that’s a lot! But at least it’s all in one place.

Wondering how you can get a copy of the finished items inventory spreadsheet?

It’s simple. Subscribe to my mailing list below and gain access to the Handmade Business Resource Library and you’ll find it there.

I’ve also included spreadsheets for tracking materials inventory (your yarn stash) and Finished Items Inventory on consignment.

Wondering how tracking inventory in spreadsheets works? Check out the video below: