How to Export Your Data From Craftybase
A file-by-file walkthrough of Craftybase's CSV exports — Materials, Products, Purchases, Manufactures, Orders — and the one thing that won't export.
Your data is yours, and getting it out of Craftybase — now Stocksmith — is straightforward. Maybe you're backing up, maybe you're switching tools, maybe you just want your business in a format you control. Any of those, here's the full walkthrough: where the export buttons live, exactly what each file contains, and the one thing that doesn't come out no matter what.
Where the exports live
There's no single "download everything" button. Instead, each list page has its own export — look for the download icon on the Materials page, the Products page, and so on. Click it and you get a CSV file, the plain-text spreadsheet format every tool on earth can read.
One habit to build before you click anything: clear your filters first. The export honors whatever search or filter is active on the page. If you've filtered to "low stock" or a single category and then export, you'll download only those rows and not notice until later. Reset each list to show everything, then export. Do it once, do it clean.
You're pulling six exports, which produce eight files, because two of them come in two parts.
The six exports, one at a time
1. Materials
Your raw inventory — the stuff you buy to make things. The file carries a column for each material's ID, name, category, and SKU, plus the numbers that matter: Stock On Hand (your current quantity), Actual Unit Cost (the weighted-average cost per unit Craftybase calculated), tracking and purchase units, low-stock limit, and starting quantity. If you track fabric in yards, dye in grams, or oils in ounces, this is where those live.
The number to trust for cost is Actual Unit Cost, not the plain Unit Cost. Craftybase runs a weighted-average costing method, so Actual Unit Cost is the blended real cost across everything you've bought.
2. Products
The things you sell. Columns include the product ID, SKU, title, Stock on hand, Base unit price (your list price), and Base sale cost — which is the per-unit materials cost, your effective COGS per item. Note that one for later; it's the single most useful number in the whole export if you're rebuilding recipes anywhere.
3. Purchases (two files)
Your buying history. This one exports as a header file plus a line-items file. The header carries each purchase's date, vendor, code, item total, tax, shipping, and grand total. The line-items file is the substance — every individual line you bought, with Material, Material SKU, Quantity, Total price, Expense date, and vendor. Material lines are effectively your received lots; non-material lines (packaging, tools, overhead) are your expenses.
4. Manufactures
Every batch you made. Columns include the manufacture ID, Start Date and End Date, batch code, product and variation, Minutes Worked, Quantity and Actual Quantity, Total Labour Cost, and Total Materials Cost. This is your production record — what you made, when, how long it took, and what it cost in materials and labor at the time.
5. Orders (two files)
Your sales. Like Purchases, it comes as a header file plus a line-items file. The header has order code, order date, customer details, totals, and tax. The line-items file is where the money detail lives: SKU, Product Name, Quantity, Item Price, and — importantly — Material Cost, which is the materials-only COGS for that line. Each line also carries its own ID, which makes it a clean, stable record.
6. Contacts
Your customer list, if you kept one — names, emails, addresses, phone, and any pricing tier. Optional, but easy to grab while you're in there.
What does NOT export (and it's not a bug)
Here's the honest limit, and it's the same regardless of where your data is headed: recipes don't export. The link between a product and the materials that go into it, with the amounts, isn't in any of these files. Craftybase simply doesn't put your bill of materials in an export. You can see every material and every product, but not the wiring between them.
A couple of other things stay behind, too. Your adjustment and stocktake history doesn't come — only the current derived stock on the Materials file. And your variations only appear as text strings inside the Manufactures and Order line items, not as their own export.
None of that is a plot. It's just the shape of the data Craftybase chose to expose. But if you're exporting because you're moving to another tool, the recipe gap is the thing that'll cost you an evening on the other end, so plan for it.
The recipe workaround
You can't export recipes, but you left yourself a cheat sheet without realizing it: the Base sale cost column in your Products file. That's the per-unit materials cost Craftybase had been carrying for each product. When you rebuild a recipe in a new tool, that number is your target — rebuild the ingredient list, and if your per-unit cost lands on the old Base sale cost, you know you got it right.
Say your Products export shows a beaded bracelet at a Base sale cost of $3.40. In the new tool you rebuild the recipe: 18 seed beads, a clasp, 0.4 g of wire, findings. If it totals near $3.40, faithful. If it comes out at $2.10, you forgot a line — probably the clasp or the wire. The old number catches the omission for you. It's a surprisingly good check, and it's the reason to export Products even if you think you only need Materials.
Keep a copy, and re-export now and then
Even if you're not switching anything today, run this export once and keep the files somewhere safe with the date in the folder name. Then do it again every few months. Two reasons. First, a plain-text copy of your whole business is the cheapest insurance there is against a bad account day, a billing lapse, or a platform decision you didn't see coming — and makers have been burned by all three. Second, having a recent export means that if you ever do decide to move, half the work is already sitting in a folder. A CSV opens in Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers, or a plain text editor, so you can eyeball it any time without special software. The files are small. There's no reason not to have them.
Getting it back in somewhere useful
Exports are only half the story — the point is landing them somewhere. Most tools that import will take your Materials and Products and stop there, leaving your years of purchases, batches, and sales behind.
MadeKeeper takes all of it. Drop the whole pile of CSVs in at once and it reads the column headers to sort them out — Materials and Products set your current stock, Purchases become material lots, Manufactures become batches, and Orders become sales, each on its original date with the costs Craftybase already calculated preserved. You get a preview and a summary before anything is written, and one click undoes the entire import if it's not right. The full-history migration is free.
If you make jewelry specifically, the MadeKeeper page for jewelry makers shows how metal by the gram, stones by the carat, and scrap back to the jar cost out once your history is in.
However you use your export — as a backup, a fresh start, or just proof that your business is yours to move — get it out clean and keep a copy. And if you'd like to see it land somewhere with the whole history intact, MadeKeeper is free during the founding pilot while you bring it over, $19 a month after, one plan, no tiers. Your data was always portable. This is what it looks like to actually use that.