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How to Switch From Craftybase to MadeKeeper

The honest, complete walkthrough of moving your whole Craftybase history to MadeKeeper: export, import, rebuild recipes, and what you'll lose.

MadeKeeper · July 31, 2026

Craftybase became Stocksmith on July 1, 2026, and it's growing toward bigger operations now. That's a fair path for a software company to take. But if you're still the person it was originally built for — one bench, one booth, a couple of sales channels — you might be looking for a tool that's built to stay your size. This is the complete, honest walkthrough of moving to MadeKeeper: not just your current stock, but the whole business behind it, with the parts that don't come across named plainly so nothing surprises you.

Plan on an afternoon. Nothing here is risky, because the whole import is previewed before it writes anything and undoes with one click. Let's walk it.

Before you start: what to expect

The move has three real steps: export your data out of Craftybase, drop it into MadeKeeper, and rebuild your recipes. The first two take maybe twenty minutes of actual clicking. The third — rebuilding recipes — is the real work, and it's an evening for most makers, because Craftybase can't export recipes at all. More on that below, because it's the single most important thing to understand before you begin.

Here's the reassuring part, and it's worth holding onto through the whole process: you cannot break anything. MadeKeeper shows you a full summary of what it's about to import before a single row is written, and if the result looks wrong, one click reverses the entire import and puts you back to an empty account. There's no way to half-import yourself into a mess. Try it, look at it, undo it if you don't like it.

Step 1 — Export your data from Craftybase

Log into your account at stocksmith.io (your old craftybase.com login still works; the pages just redirect). Exports don't live in one big "download everything" button. Instead, each list page has its own export icon. You'll pull five that matter, plus contacts if you want them:

Go to each page, and before you click export, clear any active filter. This is the one mistake that bites people. The export honors whatever search or filter is showing, so if you're filtered to "low stock" or one category and export, you'll download a partial file and not notice until your numbers look thin later. Reset each list to show everything first. Then export.

When you're done you'll have a small stack of CSV files in your downloads folder. That's your entire business in plain text, and the fact that you can pull it out at all is the thing to appreciate here — your data was always portable, which is exactly how it should be.

Step 2 — Import it into MadeKeeper

Open MadeKeeper and go to the import screen. Drag all the files in at once. You don't need to rename them, sort them, or import them in any particular order. MadeKeeper reads the column headers inside each file to work out what it is — a materials export, an orders line-items file, a manufactures export — so the filenames don't matter.

Then it builds a preview. This is the heart of the whole thing, and it's why the move is safe. Before writing anything, MadeKeeper shows you a summary that reads something like:

142 materials · 88 products · 1,204 purchase lines → 1,190 lots + 14 expenses · 631 makes · 2,417 sales

Alongside that summary is a short review list of anything it couldn't match automatically. That list is doing you a favor, not scolding you. If 31 of your makes point at a product that isn't in the Products file you dropped, it tells you so, plainly, instead of guessing and quietly inventing a product. Nine times out of ten the fix is "you exported the Products list with a filter on — grab the full one and add it." Drop the missing file in, and the references resolve.

It's worth understanding why this can't double-count your stock, because that's the thing people rightly worry about with an import. MadeKeeper sets your current on-hand exactly once, straight from Craftybase's own "Stock On Hand" figure. The purchases, makes, and sales it imports are written purely as dated records — they do not re-run the make-and-sell math, so there's no second pass inflating or draining your counts behind the scenes. Your shelf reads what your shelf actually holds. The history sits behind it as the paper trail. One number, one source, no replay.

When the preview looks right, commit. Spot-check a few pieces against Craftybase to settle your nerves — pick a product you know well and confirm its stock and a couple of past sales line up. If anything's off, undo the whole thing and re-export more cleanly. If it's right, you're most of the way home.

Step 3 — Rebuild your recipes

This is the part that takes real time, and it's the same for anyone leaving Craftybase for anywhere, so it's worth doing well. Recipes don't export. The link between a product and the materials that go into it, with the amounts, isn't in any Craftybase file. That's not something MadeKeeper is failing to read; Craftybase simply doesn't put your bill of materials in an export, so no tool on earth can import it.

Two things make this manageable. First, MadeKeeper hands you a target to aim at. Every product came across carrying its "base sale cost" from Craftybase — the per-unit materials cost Craftybase had been tracking. When you rebuild a recipe, you'll see whether your ingredient list lands on that same number, which turns a guessing game into a checkable one.

Say you make a four-ounce goat milk soap bar, and your imported product shows a base sale cost of $1.12. You open the product in MadeKeeper and rebuild the recipe as a batch of 12:

That's $7.21 for the batch, over 12 bars, so about $0.60 a bar in the soap plus $0.14 for the wrap — $0.74. That's a bit low against the old $1.12, which tells you something's missing: probably a cost you'd folded into your Craftybase materials that you haven't re-entered yet, like a mica or a higher oil price. The target number caught the gap for you. When your rebuild lands near $1.12, the recipe is faithful.

Work through your active sellers this way. A maker with thirty or forty real products can do it in an evening. And unlike the mechanical import, this step makes you look hard at your costs again, which is almost never wasted time — it's usually where someone discovers they've been underpricing a whole line for a year.

What comes over, and what it means for you

Once those three steps are done, here's what you actually have — and it's more than most "imports" give you:

Nothing is stamped with today's date. A sale from March 2023 reads as March 2023. That's not a nicety — it's the only way your reports mean anything. Your year-end tax packet, mapped to Schedule C with materials-only COGS, spans your real history instead of starting from a blank slate. Your per-event profit numbers work on years of sales. Your best-seller and channel-mix reports have something to chew on from day one. All of it on the one $19 plan, and all of it undoable if the import didn't land right.

What you'll lose — the honest tradeoffs

This is the section that matters most, so it gets its own heading and no sugar. A move like this is only worth making if you know exactly what you're giving up. Here's the straight version.

Your recipes don't come across. Covered above, but it bears repeating because it's the real cost of switching: you rebuild your bills of materials by hand, an evening's work, guided by each product's own target cost. The saving grace is that your history doesn't need them — every past batch and sale already carries its frozen cost, so your tax numbers and profit reports are correct the moment the import finishes. Recipes only cost the next thing you make. But budget the evening; don't pretend it's instant.

Some things on MadeKeeper's side are still being built. Being honest about this is the point. Today, MadeKeeper does not yet have live Etsy order sync — the connect screen is scaffolded and it's close, but it's not live, so for now Etsy sales get logged by hand or brought in by CSV rather than flowing in automatically. Square sync isn't live yet either. There's no built-in storefront or website, no shipping-label printing, no email-your-past-buyers campaigns, and no AI receipt-scanning or photo-to-listing entry yet. Those are on the way, not in your hands today. If automatic Etsy sync is the one feature you can't run your week without, it's fair to wait for it to ship before you move — or to move now for the ledger and let the sync catch up to you.

Marketplace fees on your past sales don't come over. Craftybase's order export doesn't include Etsy or Shopify fees, so the net-after-fees on your imported history is approximate. Going forward, MadeKeeper captures real fees per sale (and will capture them automatically once Etsy sync lands).

Your adjustment and stocktake audit trail stays behind. Only your current derived stock comes across, not the full log of every correction you ever made. The transactions that matter for taxes — purchases, makes, sales — all come. The keystroke-by-keystroke edit history doesn't, and you won't miss it.

Your contacts have nowhere to land yet. MadeKeeper doesn't keep a customer list at the moment, so the Contacts export sits unused. Keep your copy.

Who should NOT switch

The most useful thing an honest guide can tell you is when the answer is "stay." If you've genuinely grown into a bigger operation — staff logging into the same account, thousands of orders a month, a real need for multi-level bills of materials, production scheduling, or wholesale management — then Stocksmith is now built for exactly that, and you should stay with it. MadeKeeper isn't building those things, on purpose. It's not for manufacturers or growing warehouses. It's for the maker who's staying at bench-and-booth scale and wants a tool that will too. If that's not you anymore, Stocksmith grew up in the direction you're heading, and that's a good fit — no hard feelings, no wrong choice.

If soap is your craft, the MadeKeeper page for soap makers walks through cure dates, per-bar COGS, and batch costing in soap's own words once you've moved in.

The honest bottom line

Export takes twenty minutes. Import and preview take another ten, with a one-click undo standing behind every bit of it. Rebuilding recipes is an evening, with a target number checking your work at each step. By the end of an afternoon your whole history — dated, costed, tax-ready — is sitting in a tool that's $19 a month, one plan, no tiers to climb, and built to stay the size you are. The recipe rebuild and the still-building sync list are the real tradeoffs; now you know both before you spend a minute.

MadeKeeper is free during the founding pilot while you get your history moved in, and the person who answers your email built the importer you'd be using. Bring the whole thing over, look at your real numbers, and undo it if it's not for you. It was always your business to move.