The short version- Shared materials get messyOne ingredient across eight products means eight formulas to update when the price changes.
- No commitment trackingA sheet does not know which of your stock is already promised to an accepted order.
- Version driftThe copy on your laptop and the copy on your phone slowly disagree, and both feel authoritative.
- No alertsA spreadsheet will never tell you that you are three days from running out of wax.
Takeaway. The moment you have more than a handful of recipes, you need a system that recalculates itself.
The four breakpoints, in the order you will hit them
Breakpoint one is shared materials. With three products, a price change in butter means editing three recipe tabs. With eight products it means eight, and one gets missed, so your margins quietly disagree with each other. Every new product makes every future price change more dangerous.
Breakpoint two is commitment. The sheet can tell you flour on the shelf, but not how much of it is already promised to Saturday's two orders. Makers patch this with a notes column, and the notes column lies within a fortnight because nothing forces it to update when an order changes.
Breakpoints three and four arrive together: drift and silence. The laptop copy and the phone copy diverge, and nobody notices until a stocktake. And the day wax drops below a safe level, the spreadsheet says nothing at all, because spreadsheets only answer questions someone remembers to ask.
What to keep in a spreadsheet, and what to move
Keep using spreadsheets for one-off analysis: costing a possible new product, modelling a price rise, working out whether a market stall fee is worth it. A spreadsheet is the best thinking tool ever made for questions you ask once.
Move anything that must stay true over time: current stock, bills of materials, committed orders, reorder points. These are living data with dozens of small writes a week, and every write is a chance for a human to edit the wrong cell. Living data belongs in a system where one change, a delivery, an accepted order, a new price, updates everything derived from it automatically.
The test is simple. If a wrong number in it would reach a customer, it should not live in a spreadsheet.
A migration path that does not eat a weekend
Do not rebuild everything at once. Start with your materials list: names, units, current stock, last price paid. That is one CSV export away from any spreadsheet, and it is the foundation every other number sits on.
Next, add the BOM for your three best sellers only. Those three products usually account for most of your volume, and capacity numbers for them deliver most of the value on day one. Long-tail products can follow as you sell them.
Finally, run both systems in parallel for one fortnight. Check the system's capacity numbers against your sheet before you trust it with a customer promise. Once the numbers agree twice, retire the sheet with confidence rather than ceremony.
For information and estimates only. Makeable's formulas, batch limits and margin calculations are mathematical estimates based on your inputs. They are not certified accounting, financial, pricing or tax advice. You are solely responsible for setting your own wholesale and retail prices, ensuring profitability, and checking cost calculations before committing money.
Common questions
When should a maker stop using an inventory spreadsheet?
When any of these become regular: you sell the same material twice because two orders assumed it was free, a price change means editing more than three or four places, or you discover a stockout only when a batch stalls. For most makers that arrives somewhere between five and ten active products.
What breaks first in a production spreadsheet?
Shared materials. One ingredient used across many products means the same price or quantity lives in many formulas, and one of them gets missed on every update. The errors are silent, so margins and capacity numbers drift apart without anyone noticing.
Can I import my spreadsheet into Makeable?
Yes. Export your materials as a CSV with name, unit, stock and price columns, and import it directly. Then set up recipes for your top products and the capacity numbers start working immediately.
