About recipes

Learn how recipes help you speed up your manufacturing, determine the true cost of creating your product batch and calculate your optimal pricing.

In this article, we'll cover:

• What is a recipe?
• Checking material stock levels
• Tracking material costs
• Setting the best price
• Printing a copy of your recipe
• Troubleshooting recipes
• Recipes FAQ

What is a recipe?

A recipe is a list of materials used to create a batch of your product. You can:

• Check if you have enough materials to make a batch 
• Track how much producing a batch of your product will cost 
• Set the best price to earn a profit

By adding recipes in Craftybase, you can reuse these lists each time you create manufactures for your products.

Craftybase automatically calculates your total materials cost based on the current value of the materials in your recipe.

• 2 cups cake flour
• 1&1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 7 large egg yolks
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup cold water
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 7 large egg whites
• 1/2 tsp cream of tartar

Checking material stock levels

In Craftybase, Charlie opens the chiffon cake product page and adds their recipe. They see how much material they'd need to make this recipe and if they have enough on-hand material stock. With this information, they stay on top of their stock levels to sell chiffon cakes weekly.

Tracking material costs

As Charlie adds materials to the chiffon cake recipe, Craftybase calculates the cost of each material. This helps track the cost of making one chiffon cake based on the recipe's requirements and current material stock levels.   

Setting the best price

Taking the recipe's total manufacturing cost and the number of chiffon cakes they can sell, Charlie sees pricing guidance information in Craftybase. This helps them decide how much to sell one chiffon cake, so they earn profit with each sale.

Craftybase provides suggested minimum prices if they sell their chiffon cake wholesale, at a physical shop, on Etsy, and more.

Printing recipes

To print your recipe:

1. Click and choose Recipes in the main menu.

   

2. Choose your recipe from the list.

3. Click Print on the top-right side of the recipes page.

   

Troubleshooting Recipes

Common scenarios and troubleshooting to help you understand and fix your recipe issues.

In this section:

• The item materials cost in a recipe is displayed as zero (0.00)

The item materials cost in a recipe is displayed as zero (0.00)

Every Material in the Recipe that you wish to have counted towards the total material price needs to be categorized as Inventoriable.

This is to ensure that things that you use but don’t use up (like scissors or other equipment) in the production of the product don’t get counted in the total material cost.

If you want to add a non inventoriable material to the product as a cost, add it via the Purchases section instead of the batch recipe.

Recipes FAQ

Below are some common questions about recipes.

In this section:

• Can I create a recipe that creates more than one product?
• I have too many variations to create recipes

Can I create a recipe that creates more than one product?

Recipes can only be created for a single product, however you can potentially use components in order to create a two step process that results in increasing your stock for more than one product.

This can be helpful in situations where you firstly make a large batch of a product and then later package the product into different sizes / formats in order to sell them.

For example, if I make Body Butter and sell this in 3 jar sizes (Small, Medium, Large) I could use a component in order to create my large batch of Body Butter, and then include the component into my variations to track my different size jars.

Creating the Body Butter as a component will mean that you don't need to repeat the ingredients for each jar you make - all you will need to do is add a reference to the "Body Butter" component to each variation recipe along with the amount required for each jar. Using a component means you will manufacture the component before you create your jars in order to increase your stock of butter for use in your jars. 

If you also add custom materials to each jar (i.e. a different fragrance) you will need to add the amount of fragrance added at the jar level, or alternatively you may wish to treat each fragranced body butter as a separate component product so that you don't need to calculate the fractional amount used in each jar.

Once you have your components and recipes in place for your Body Butter, in order stock up the correct number of jars you are going to sell, you'll need to add manufacture records for each of the variations so that they can be linked to the correct size.

I have too many variations to create recipes

If your products have many variations, creating recipes can be quite time-consuming. 

Firstly, it's important to decide if you require recipes at all: recipes are not an essential part of Craftybase as they are only used as a template to populate your manufactures with your material lists automatically. You can instead decide to create your recipe usage directly on your manufactures and ignore the recipe feature entirely. 

Suppose you sell the same products over and over. In that case, recipes however may be a good idea to set up in the long run as it will speed up your workflow (and if you have a simple manufacturing process and make your products on the same day that your order is received, you might like to use auto-manufacturing to automate some of this also).

An option for this approach to create your recipes only as new combinations are sold, with the aim to eventually have the majority/most popular of your variations covered.