Accounting for overhead costs

Overhead costs are the ongoing business expenses that are necessary to run your business but are not directly tied to producing a specific product. Examples include rent, utilities, office supplies, insurance, marketing, and admin wages.

Since overheads are real costs that affect your profitability, it’s important to account for them when setting your product prices.

Overheads can be included in the pricing guidance feature for your products through the Pricing section in your Account Settings. (How do I find my account settings page?)

1. Navigate to Account Settings → Pricing

   In the Overheads section, enter your overhead either as:

   • Percentage – calculated from each product’s total material + labor cost
   • Fixed cost – added as a set amount to each product’s total material + labor cost

For guidance on how to calculate an accurate overhead amount for your business, please take a look at our blog post here: How to calculate overheads into your product pricing.

Alternatively, you can include overheads into your pricing markup percentages - these can be configured on your Pricing Tiers page.

FAQ

Can I add costs like electricity or rent directly into my manufacturing process?

No — costs such as electricity, rent, water, internet, and similar business expenses are considered overheads, not materials. Since these expenses support your entire business rather than a single product, they aren’t added directly to individual manufactures.

Instead, you can:

• Track these expenses by recording them as purchases in Craftybase. Please take a look at our article About Purchases to learn more about it.
• Apply them to your product pricing through your overhead settings, either as a fixed cost per product or a percentage of your material + labor costs.

This way, your ongoing business costs are properly factored into your product pricing without needing to attach them to each manufacture individually.