Is tracking the cost of your handmade items have you frazzled? In need of a solution? Discover a hassle-free way to track costs and set prices for your handmade items with the Project Costs & Pricing Worksheet. Designed for handmade business owners, this free tool eliminates guesswork, calculates costs, and keeps you organized.
As handmade business owners, it’s crucial for us to not only keep track of our overall business expenses but also the costs associated with each finished item or pattern that we create. Without knowing the exact cost of creating a specific item, how can we determine its appropriate selling price? The Project Cost & Pricing Worksheet eliminates the need for guesswork.
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you?
- Relying on memory to track the costs of your finished handmade items.
- Having numerous sticky notes covered in numbers, leaving you wondering, “What were these for?”
- Feeling frustrated and uncertain if you have accounted for all the costs.
- Resorting to guessing the costs.
If the process of tracking costs for handmade items has you feeling frazzled, fear not! All you need is a tool that can do the math for you, eliminate guesswork in pricing, and help you stay organized.
A solution to help you take the guesswork out of tracking the cost of your handmade items…
Introducing the Project Costs & Pricing Worksheet!
When I started my own handmade business (Fanciful Things, LLC), a few years ago, I created the Project Costs & Pricing Worksheet. It was originally designed to keep track of all the costs involved in making amigurumi (such as yarns used, yards utilized, and the size of the eyes).
However, I wanted more than just basic information. I desired a single sheet of paper or a spreadsheet that would provide me with the complete details about each amigurumi project for future reference. I wanted everything conveniently kept in one place, including:
- project information – pattern name, who designed it, where I downloaded it from, the yarns I used
- how many yards of what color yarn I used for each piece of the amigurumi (head, arms, legs, etc.)
- how many total yards of each color I used
- the price per yard
- the cost of the yarn I used
- costs for eyes, felt, ribbon, false eyelashes…..EVERYTHING (afterall I had spent the money on the supplies and need to recapture those costs)
- how much time it took me to make the finished item
Additionally I wanted a list of the costs for the yarns I typically used without having to search for pricing elsewhere.
But most importantly, I wanted a tool that would handle all the calculations for me, sparing me the hassle of searching for a calculator and manually adding everything up!
Excel proved to be the perfect tool for designing the Project Costs & Pricing Worksheet.
It starts with 3 pretty simple looking sections – one for tracking yardages and supplies, another for tracking time, and one to track your Inventory/Cost of Materials.
Once you’ve entered the prices of your favorite inventory and materials, all you need to do is print out several blank copies of the other two pages, put them on a clipboard and start keeping track. Once you’ve finished the project you can open the spreadsheet, make a copy of the blank “master spreadsheet” and start transferring all the relevant information to it. As you input yardages and costs, the spreadsheet starts doing all the math for you. Plus,, you’ll have a permanent record of the cost of each item that you make stored conveniently on your computer.
Want to see the Project Pricing Worksheet in action? Watch this YouTube video.
Want your own copy of the Project Costs & Pricing Worksheet and start tracking the costs of your handmade items with ease?
Simply subscribe to our newsletter using the form below. I’ll give it to you as a subscriber “thank you”. Right now this is the ONLY way that you can get your copy for free.
How are you currently tracking costs of your handmade items?
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