Free tools Capacity
Divide the available quantity of each required material by the quantity that material needs per finished unit. Each division gives a possible number of units. The smallest result is your production capacity, and the material that produced it is your bottleneck. Everything else is surplus until that one material is topped up.
Production capacity = minimum of (stock of material ÷ amount of that material per unit)
A chocolate cake needs 300 g flour, 120 g butter and 4 eggs per cake. The shelf holds 8 kg flour, 1.5 kg butter and 60 eggs.
Result. Capacity is 12 cakes. Butter is the bottleneck, so buying flour or eggs changes nothing today.
Enter what one batch consumes, how many units that batch yields, and what you hold in stock. The calculator converts the batch recipe to a per unit requirement and reports the lowest ceiling.
300 g per unit26 units possible
120 g per unit12 units possible
4 pcs per unit15 units possible
80 g per unit30 units possible
This runs entirely in your browser and nothing is saved. Makeable keeps the same calculation running against your live stock, so it re-answers itself every time an order arrives. Start free or read how to calculate production capacity.
Production is a chain. A finished unit needs every material in its recipe, so the material with the least cover decides the whole run. This is why an averaged view of stock value is misleading: you can hold thousands of dollars of inventory and still be capped at twelve units by one cheap ingredient.
The practical consequence is that capacity responds to one purchase at a time. Once you top up the bottleneck, the next lowest material becomes the new ceiling, and the number moves up in steps rather than smoothly.
Most small producers write recipes per batch: a mix that yields ten cakes, a pour that yields twelve candles. Capacity is a per unit calculation, so divide the batch amount by the batch yield first. A 3 kg flour mix that yields ten cakes is 300 g of flour per cake.
If you can only produce in whole batches, calculate capacity per unit and then round down to the nearest whole batch. The batch calculator on this site does that step for you.
Capacity per product is only true in isolation. When two products share butter, making one reduces the ceiling of the other. If you sell both, decide the split before you promise anything, or track it in software that deducts stock as orders are accepted.
Makeable calculates production capacity for every product from one shared pool of materials, so accepting an order for cakes immediately lowers the capacity shown for brownies.
Makeable is production capacity and inventory planning software for small businesses that make physical goods from recipes or bills of materials. It stores your materials and recipes, keeps stock current as orders arrive, and runs the calculation on this page continuously rather than on request, so the answer to "can I make this?" is always current.
You can start on the free plan with three products and fifteen materials, see how the production engine works, or compare plans and limits.
Production capacity equals the minimum, across all required materials, of stock divided by the amount of that material needed per finished unit. The material producing the minimum is the bottleneck.
Calculate the material ceiling first, then compare it with the time ceiling: available production hours divided by hours per unit. Daily capacity is the lower of the two. Materials usually bind first for small producers.
Inventory is what you hold. Capacity is what that inventory lets you finish. Sixty eggs is inventory; twelve cakes is capacity. Inventory software tracks the first, this calculator answers the second.
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.