FREE WORKBOOK
Materials and Batch Log
Turn a bag of clay into a cost per mug, work out what a batch really cost after the ones that came out wrong, and count all three kinds of stock at your year end.
Because nobody sells a kilogram of clay, and the gap between what you buy and what you sell is where handmade costing goes wrong.
Who this workbook is for
Profitable sellers who still have weeks where the money looks wrong, and cannot see why.
Every purchase becomes a cost per unit
Log what you bought, how much of it and what you paid, and the sheet gives you the cost per kilo, per metre, per sheet. To three decimal places, because clay at £1.48 a kilo and a mug using 340 grams is 50p, and rounding that away loses real money across a batch.
Every batch is costed on the ones that survived
Make forty mugs, lose five to the kiln, and the thirty-five that sell have to carry the clay and the glaze of all forty. The sheet divides by the good ones rather than by the ones you started. On a batch with eight failures out of thirty-six, getting that backwards understates the cost of every item by twenty-two per cent.
Three kinds of stock, and most makers count one
At your year end you hold raw materials, work in progress, and finished goods. All three are assets. On the worked example, counting only the finished shelf misses £1,955, which is forty-seven per cent of the real closing stock. Understating closing stock overstates your cost of sales, which understates your profit. It feels like a smaller tax bill and it is simply wrong.
