The whole maker back office.
From the first material you buy to the packet you hand your tax preparer.
MadeKeeper is one place for the business side of making things — the inventory, the money, the deductions, the "should I do this fair again?" call. Here's every part of it, and a straight line through everything it does. No feature listed here is invented; the ones marked Live now are in the app right this minute.
Materials and true cost per piece, batch "makes" with your labor amortized in, the suggested-price coach, product variants, sales that drain stock, the market-day quick-sale screen, lot tracking, the was-this-fair-worth-it event math, money-insight reports, multi-location consignment, the cure/best-by heads-up engine, mileage, expenses, and the Schedule C tax packet are all in the app today, with guided setup and a full Craftybase history migration to get you started. So are Etsy order sync, Square card sync, your own shop page, a Buy button on your own Square account, and custom-order requests off a piece you already sold. On the $24 MadeKeeper AI plan you also get receipts, shelves and recipe cards read from a photo — photo reads are on that plan; hand entry is how the $19 shop starts. Still building: your own books answered in plain words, buying a shipping label inside the app, and a best-customers report. MadeKeeper does not send marketing email to your buyers and is not going to: every maker here sends from one shared reputation, and a quote that has to arrive matters more than a mailing list. Nothing above is dressed up as done when it is not.
Know your true numbers
Most makers price by feel and find out in April whether it worked. MadeKeeper turns your materials and your sales into the one number that matters: what you actually kept.
MadeKeeper counts every material you buy
Every material — glaze, clay, thread, wax, resin, beads — with a unit cost and a running quantity on hand. It draws down as you make and sell, so you know when to reorder before a batch stalls.MadeKeeper calculates the true cost of each piece
Give a product a recipe of materials and MadeKeeper works out what it really cost you, automatically. Change a material price and every piece that uses it updates. Now your prices come from numbers.MadeKeeper spreads your time across a batch
Log a make — 90 minutes to pour 12 candles — and the labor amortizes across the batch at $2.50 a candle. You get the fully-loaded cost per piece and the materials-only figure side by side. The tax packet keeps materials-only, because your own labor isn't a deductible what your pieces cost.MadeKeeper suggests a retail and wholesale price
MadeKeeper reads your fully-loaded cost and suggests a retail and a wholesale price, then flags the pieces you've priced under a healthy markup. The number, not a mindset shift.MadeKeeper builds every variant off one recipe
One soap recipe, ten scents; one mug form, three glazes. Each variant carries its own on-hand count and price while sharing the recipe's cost math — no ten near-identical products to maintain.MadeKeeper lists products in bulk or one at a time
Run a line of mugs with real stock counts, or list a single carved vase in portfolio mode. Same app, whichever way you make. Nobody's asking you to pick a lane.If a batch is ever recalled, MadeKeeper traces the lot from supplier to buyer
Each material purchase can carry a lot number that follows it into the batch and out to the sale. If a supplier ever recalls an ingredient, you can see exactly which batches and which sales it touched — the record inspected kitchens keep, without the binder.MadeKeeper shows the month at a glance
Revenue, true profit after materials and fees, margin, units sold, and which piece is your best earner and which is dead weight.Sell it, and count it once
You sell at the booth, on Etsy, off your own site, and out of the back of the car. Logging a sale should take one tap and update everything else on its own.
MadeKeeper records a sale from any channel
Booth, Etsy, your own website, or a friend who Venmo'd you. Record it once; stock drops, materials draw down, and the money lands on your books and your taxes.MadeKeeper takes a booth sale in two taps
A thumb-sized booth screen for the rush: tap the piece, set the quantity, done. Finished goods only, fast enough for a line — no card reader needed, just a fast way to keep the count honest while you sell.MadeKeeper follows consignment stock into other shops
Send a dozen pieces to a shop and track them there: what's on their shelf, what sold, what came back, and what they still owe you — with the oldest unpaid sale showing its age.MadeKeeper publishes your own shop page
A public page of your work at madekeeper.com/shop/your-name, in your colours, built from the products already in the app. Photograph a piece for your own records and it is on your page — there is no second place to keep up to date. Your story gets a page of its own; a photo tray puts what you just made on the site in ten seconds (the newest 30 ride a “fresh from the bench” strip); and a gallery mosaic you drag to arrange holds your favorites — videos included. Selling from the page runs through your own Square account, switched on only when you choose.MadeKeeper logs Square card sales automatically
Connect Square once and your card sales log themselves against the right piece, carrying the real processing fee — so the profit is what you actually kept. Read-only: MadeKeeper can never change a price, an item, or an order of yours.MadeKeeper imports Etsy orders with their fees
MadeKeeper connects to an Etsy shop with read-only access and imports each receipt as a sale. MadeKeeper spreads that order's Etsy fees across the items in it, and a listing linked to a product carries that product's true cost, so the figure is what the maker kept. Every sync is one reversible import, and the same receipt never imports twice.MadeKeeper is adding shipping labels in the app
Buy and print the label on the order it belongs to. Recording postage per order is live today — buying it from inside MadeKeeper, on your own carrier account, is the next piece.MadeKeeper is building a best-customers report
Etsy orders now arrive carrying buyer names, so the record exists. Ranking your repeat buyers off it is the next piece; a booth or cash sale still has nobody attached to it, and it never will unless you type one.At the booth
Everything above assumes you are at the bench. Saturday is the other half: one hand, the phone you actually own, and somebody waiting. Here is what MadeKeeper does at the table, including what it does when the bars run out.
MadeKeeper opens on one bar of signal, or none
The app keeps a copy of itself on your phone, so it comes up in a church hall the way it comes up in your kitchen. Your records still come down from the server, so the day's fresh numbers want a moment of signal somewhere — but you never hand a customer a dead page.When the signal quits, MadeKeeper holds the sale you just rang
A ticket that can't reach the server is saved on the phone, survives closing the app, and goes through by itself the next time you open booth mode or open MadeKeeper. Each line carries its own token, so a sale that half-landed and then caught up is recorded once and never twice — a doubled sale overstates what you made, which is worse than a lost one.MadeKeeper ties a booth sale to the fair you're standing at
Ring it up and the sale files itself against that day's event, on the booth channel, with its own materials cost frozen onto it. Nothing extra to type, and the was-it-worth-it math for the day is already right by the time you get back to the truck.MadeKeeper reads the tag you printed yourself
Tap Scan in booth mode, point the camera at the code on your own label, and the piece drops into the ticket at its price. Chrome on Android reads it with the camera. Where a browser has no barcode reader built in — every iPhone, for one — MadeKeeper says so plainly and gives you a box to type the code, which works everywhere. A viewfinder that quietly does nothing is worse than a text field that works.MadeKeeper prints the market-day sheet before you load the truck
One page for that venue, with the what-to-bring column already filled in from what actually sold there and the counting columns left blank. Booth fee, miles, hours and weather get their own boxes. Brought minus home-with is what really left the table, and if that beats the sales you logged, the difference is a cash sale nobody rang up. Paper, because a phone dies and a card table is windy.Booth mode is a fast way to keep the count honest while you sell. It is not a card reader, and MadeKeeper never touches the money — you take payment however you already take it.
Know which fairs to keep
A booth fee and a two-hour drive can quietly eat a whole Saturday's take. MadeKeeper does the math you don't want to do at the end of a long market day.
Once the market's over, MadeKeeper answers whether it was worth it
For each event, subtract the booth fee, the miles, the materials in what you sold, and the card fees — down to cash profit and profit per hour. Then it tells you plainly whether to go back.MadeKeeper ranks your markets by profit per hour
Line every fair up side by side and see which ones pay your time and which ones are costing you. Book next season on evidence.MadeKeeper gives away a fair-profit calculator
The same math, no signup, right on the site. Open it →See what's working, and set up fast
The point of writing it all down is getting the answers back out — where the money comes from, what to make more of, and what needs your attention before it costs you.
MadeKeeper reports where your money comes from
Best-sellers, most-profitable pieces, channel mix, and revenue over time — the questions you'd otherwise answer by squinting at a spreadsheet, charted from your own records. Every report, on the $19 plan, not gated behind a higher tier.Before a date or a stock level bites, MadeKeeper warns you
Low-stock reorder alerts, cure and best-by dates, start-the-batch-now reminders so you're ready for the October fair, and the weather for a booth day once you add the ZIP. Nudges, never red scolding.MadeKeeper walks you through setup
A ten-minute path from your first material to a recipe, a batch, a true cost, and a suggested price — so your very first session ends on "here's what this piece costs, and here's what to charge."Coming from another tool, MadeKeeper migrates the books you already have
Drop a spreadsheet or CSV, paste from Google Sheets, or import a Craftybase export — its column names map for you. Coming from Craftybase, you can migrate your full history: purchases become lots, production runs become batches, orders become sales, all on their original dates — previewed first, and one click to undo.MadeKeeper protects every import with undo
Every import shows a preview before it writes, flags conflicts instead of silently overwriting your hand-entered stock, and the last import undoes in one click. And it's not a one-way door — your materials and products export back to CSV any time, so nothing's locked in.Come tax time, hand it over
The goal is a February afternoon, not an April scramble. Capture the deductions all year and the packet builds itself.
MadeKeeper values mileage at the IRS rate
The 96 miles to that fair are money. Log the drive and it lands on your Schedule C at the standard rate — not lost in a glovebox notebook.MadeKeeper captures business expenses
Canopy, packaging, tools, listing fees — logged by category so nothing gets left on the table. Every dollar you spent to make the work is a dollar the taxman shouldn't get.MadeKeeper files a tax packet mapped to Schedule C
Gross revenue, what your pieces cost, inventory at cost, fees, booth fees, expenses, mileage, and an estimated net — totaled in columns that line up with Schedule C, for any range you pick: year, quarter, month, or custom dates. Exports as a clean CSV your preparer can read at a glance.Point a camera at a receipt or a shelf, and MadeKeeper reads it
Snap a craft-store receipt and the materials log themselves with prices. Photograph a shelf of supplies or a stack of recipe cards and it reads them into rows — which you check and edit before a single one is saved. The boring half, handled. This one sits on MadeKeeper AI at $24/mo. Hand entry is how the $19 shop starts.MadeKeeper answers a plain question about your own books
“What did I actually clear at the fall markets?” — asked in your own words, answered off your own records rather than a guess. On MadeKeeper AI at $24/mo.MadeKeeper turns a sold piece into a commission request
Share the link to a one-of-a-kind and someone can ask you for something similar — a new order off work you have already done, with no cold inquiry email.Everything marked Building is on the roadmap, shaped with the makers using it — the thing makers ask for most is the thing MadeKeeper builds next. Two things are deliberately not on it. MadeKeeper does not send marketing email to your buyers: every maker here sends from one shared reputation, and a quote that has to arrive matters more than a mailing list. And Canadian tax is not started — the packet maps to Schedule C only.
$19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. No card to start. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19. See the pricing page →