Once I understood that it takes time and effort to start using (and then keep using) Craftybase, it became much easier to run my business. I actually let Craftybase run ME. The customer service is top-notch (although I do wish they didn't run on UK time) and I'd be lost without it.

I love this software because the developers understand how a small manufacturing business works. They don't load you down with confusing features - just what you need when you need it. It has helped me get completely organized with raw materials, track all production, determine pricing and just basically keep everything straight. If you're a maker and you're not using it, you need to be.

I sometimes feel the software tries to be all things to all people. I really don't see why the accounting aspects are necessary and feel they are sometimes lacking.

Helps me organize my hundreds and hundreds of styles/types/colors of materials. Integrates nicely with multiple sales platforms.

The power in this is amazing! I can search through all my materials by color or fiber content or size or date purchased, etc. It's a lifesaver for me to be able to see my materials with photos and all the data I need. The recipes/manufactures and the way it calculates COGS is super powerful. I can start typing the name of the material and enter the amount — and it calculates the actual cost of materials used based on date of manufacture. Very helpful for makers who have some supply left of an old lower price and new supply purchased at a higher price. Craftybase will average the cost to figure out what your current COGS is.

Being a cloud software, it requires a subscription, which is a bit pricey. And there have been periods of downtime (though they communicate well about outages in the Facebook group). It takes a while to set everything up, and there is a bit of a learning curve.

i am sort of solving inventory issues, but there could certainly be a lot more automated features to take a lot of time off the process. if it could automatically update inventory in e-commerce systems and if it could send automatic emails to me when a product gets low, that would be hugely beneficial.

I like that it helps you price your goods including labor costs. it is pretty easy to use if you know the terminology of inventory. i also really like that it allows for consignment which a lot of other software does not. it allows for manual entry of orders which many other software programs do not.

i don't like that it doesn't update shopify or other ecommerce sites. so i have to update inventory in craftybase and then also go into shopify and update inventory there as well. you can set low inventory alerts, but it doesn't notify you, so you have to manually go in and check periodically to see which products are running low. seems to defeat the purpose of an alert. it also doesn't sync with bookkeeping systems or shipping systems.

So far, I am loving Craftybase. It is exactly what I was looking for for my business to help me streamline and be able to order materials more efficiently, make components and products more efficiently and be able to add expiry dates/lot #'s to track. The more I learn, the better it gets. I have to say that I am also very impressed with the customer service as each time I have needed to contact them for any questions or issues that have come up, they have always answered within the timeline that they have laid out in their response emails, and they have asked pertinent questions to help figure out how to solve my problem.

I like how there was a checklist available to help on where to start. I have reached out to the support desk a few times and have had great help and I didn't have to wait long for someone to answer my questions. I love the quick at-a-glance dashboard that shows me my products and materials and stock levels as well as the graph that shows profit margins and expenses.

I would really like to be able to delete products that I no longer have (discontinued) to sell instead of only being able to archive them.

Craftybase let's me get an accurate picture of what actual COGS I'm selling are, and makes it easy to track inventory consigned over multiple locations. Responsive customer support, too.

Ability to integrate with other platforms and easily track sales and expenses. Actually costing out to get COGS is definitely high on the list.

There are some limits to reporting - there are some improvements that can be made in that area.

I have faith that Craftybase will prove to be the right option for us. I think that once I *do* have it set up to fit our particular business, that it will be immensely helpful and far superior to the excel spreadsheets we were using.

The price point is excellent for the functions that you get in return. You can get technical support through email and they are quick to respond and very professional with their help.

Switching over from my previous inventory system to CraftyBase has been a HUGE learning curve. It's taken me so many hours of research and back and forth communication with their customer service team to try and set things up for my businesses particular situation. I'm still not properly set up after exchanging over 40 emails with them (wish they offered a tier where you could get direct phone support with an approved Craftybase consultant).

Good value, good customer service, gets the job done! As long as I keep manufactures and supply purchases up to date, my inventory is accurate and the program helps me not run out of materials, or over-purchase.

I still find it challenging to nearly impossible bundle products for promotional items or gift sets, even with being in their Facebook group and hearing tips from other users. It isn't intuitive in the program to bundle items together. Rather, other users share how they make it work.

Craftybase is essential to helping me run my Handmade Etsy-based small business in addition to my 9-5 job, and everyday duties of 'homeowner', 'wife' and 'mom'. It is a great tool to streamline major business functions.

I can enter all my materials (in my case: various beads, wire, packaging materials, etc) and even set "recipes" for popular items so that when someone purchases an item, I can "Manufacture" it in the software and my materials are automatically deducted according to the recipe I set. I then get warnings anytime a specific material runs low. It's literally hands-off inventory management!

It's a LOT of data to input in the beginning. The time invested up front is well worth it though!

I am thankful for this program and its ability to help organize our business and the many ingredients and products with multiple online sales outlets. It also helps to see where your time and money go, especially in ways you may not have realized.

Unique format that provides solutions to small business owners who are trying to expand their company. Provides a place and format for information that is confusing and complicated to organize.

Some things are stuck the way they are and dont apply to what Im doing or if things change in the way we create products it is hard to apply the changes. Syncing products from multiple sales channels instead of them showing as unique products over and over again can be frustrating.

Overall it's been good. I would recommend it to any other vendor if asked. There is absolutely some time required upfront to get it going but once that's done the automation saves me an hour hour or two each and every event we do. My time has value and even at minimum wage in my area I don't need but an event or three to have paid for the subscription each month. I've been that vendor making paper notes of sales at events then taking them home to file and process and after setting this up I wouldn't go back.Craftybase also tracking my COGS, inventory, helping with tax forms and tracking my expenses is just icing on the cake. Absolute time savers that free me up for other tasks to help grow my business. Each piece by itself doesn't sound like much of a savings but they add up and they add up faster than I thought they would. For us increasing our sales almost 100% over last year just means we buy more materials and setup a few extra manufactures to deepen our stock levels. The actual paperwork did not increase 100%. For the system auto-importing 200 sales a month is the same as 100 sales a month. The more sales we make the more time Crafybase saves us.

Sales integration and inventory are the biggest winners. Put some thought into and setup the SKU's correctly across your channels and a majority of the paperwork is taken care of for you. That's worth hours after each event. If you have relatively static items building a recipe for manufacturing inventory is almost as easy. Once those are seeded correctly it's just a minute to record that you made X number of an item. COGS is updated, stocks are updated and expenses are tracked.

Learning curve was moderately steep. This wasn't unexpected as my day job is in setting up production systems so I have an idea of the complexity that is needed. Expect to spend a moderate amount of time building and then probably heavily modifying what you setup that you thought was correct. You just don't know what you don't know until you start using it and realizing how it actually goes together as an entire system.Depending on your business type some shortcuts might be needed. We do jewelry sales and a variety of categories needed to be combined for our sanity. If I tracked each and every bead, gem or finding that we used we would have nearly 2,000 unique entries in the materials tab. As an example in our case some additional thought and planning had to be devised to combine all the generic ear hook styles together and build them as a trackable unit in grams. This would be repeated for the several hundred bead styles we use. Glass, gemstone, crystal, wood, 4mm, 6mm, 8mm, 10mm etc. We aren't trying to track the 10's of thousands of beads we inventory so they are categorized by price points and then inventoried and tracked by weight.These aren't quite con's just a reality of having moved into an inventory system after a year of not having a proper one and the width of material options that we had. A business that sold soap might only have a couple dozen oil options, some jars and wicks to track. This would be much easier to directly track specific items.

I love this program and recommend it frequently! I don't know of any other programs that let you keep track of inventory the way a crafter needs to, especially if you make some of your own components for the items you sell. It's amazing!

I love that you can set up everything to auto-manufacture so you don't have to go in and manually do it after every sale. It's pretty much on auto-pilot which saves a TON of time. It's also great that if you have two Etsy shops that still only counts as one Sales Channel.

I wish it didn't automatically import everything on the next import after you sign up. It would have been very helpful to just be able to import a little bit at a time to make sure everything is set up and functioning properly. There is a pretty big learning curve, but only because it is dealing with SO MUCH information. Auto manufacture is amazing, but a lot of us don't keep everything we need on hand. If I have to order something and don't have it when the auto manufacture happens, everything is calculated incorrectly. If we could set the auto-manufacture to happen x days after the sale (or x days before it ships), it would help a ton, and I wouldn't have to go back in and manually change everything. Also on the auto-manufacturing, say I run out of product stickers. And I manufacture 100 items before I buy more. It's just a small thing, so I just don't include the stickers in those 100 orders. But when I do buy more stickers, the 100 items I already made (but didn't include stickers) still count against my total. It screws up everything and I have to manually go back and change the manufacture for each sale. It would be nice if we could set it up somehow so if we're out of something, and we still manufacture the item, it doesn't count against the inventory of that item since it wasn't used. I know that sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's really just little things here and there. The program is amazing and really does a ton of work for you.

I love having my customers all in one place with orders and supplies

That I can do everything for my business on it

It’s hard to understand in the beginning and no one to talk to just email

After entering in my materials used, I can link them to my finished products so that I know exactly what inventory I have on hand and which products I can make at any time. Craftybase also automatically imports orders from various sources, which are mapped to my products. So, when it's time to fulfill orders I can see which products I need to make based on my orders, exactly the materials needed, and can easily track my production, which decreases my material count in real time. So my material inventory is always precisely up-to-date, and I can order supplies when I need them. It helps to keep me super organized with minimal effort to make sure my business runs smoothly.

It's absolutely perfect for my needs of running a small jewelry business. It keeps track of my supply inventory and how each material relates to finished products, to customer sales and production of those finished products. It's cloud based, which means I can check my orders and inventory from anywhere, and each section is intuitively linked to other sections, making it the only software I need to fully track my inventory and orders.

Nothing, honestly. It does everything I wanted it to, and intuitively.

The ease of use in setup and management made it a great choice and a huge improvement over traditional spreadsheet management. One of the determining factors for me was being able to create and sell bundles that include multiple products that I had trouble finding with other tools. It also integrates easily with a number of viable eCommerce platforms.

I would love to see more feature related to managing finances like cash flow, balance sheets, and financial planning tools

Overall I have found Craftybase to be useful and I will continue to use this software. If my business were structured a bit different, with less products and a condensed material base I would say this software is perfect.

I love that I can track materials I use and that each material can be linked to several different products. I can quickly see which materials I need to buy. I also love that I do not have to manually enter any of my sales and my daily accounting is done automatically. I can easily compare sales this month to sales this month last year without having to do any calculations on my own.

There is a lot of set up to get the materials all entered and then assign them to the products. I sell over 100 products in my shop with each one requiring many different materials. By the time I had every material entered and connected to all my products I had already discontinued some products and added others. My shop is a little too complex to be handled by just myself. To make this software work for me I would need to hire someone to help with updating the inventory numbers, yet I am to small to afford help. This software would be perfect for a shop with 10-30 products if the products only use a couple of materials each. I also don't like that I have to manually attach my shipping costs to the correlating order.

I am new to Craftybase, so most of my experience is limited to just the setup process, but I hope this helps inventory managing and control be less stressful. I feel like Craftybase has the best set of features for products that don't come pre-assembled. I find the price point to be quite high - especially since I cannot get manufacture at a lower level plan. We will see how much value Craftybase adds and whether it is worth the price point.

I really like that Craftybase integrates with multiple sales channels that I use. This, along with auto-manufacturing makes it easy for items to be adjusted as I sell, and I can have an accurate real-time look at all the materials I have on hand.

I found the process of getting Craftybase up and running very labor intensive - especially having over 200+ SKUs. I wish there was an easier bulk editing feature. It feels really clunky at times and there is a lot of clicking in and out of different pages in order to get each product set up - even after using the upload csv feature.

Overrall, I recommend Craftybase. They make it possible to download all the data that has been inputted and see overall projections and uses that accorded. Also, it is helpful to be able to notify us when we are running out of materials and/or it is easy to see where mistakes are, so they can be fixed. The interface is fantastic from a quick glance. Just a few too many steps to input things individually.

I LOVE that it allows multiple different parts of the business to be tracked. Expenses, products, materials used, and labor all in one place. I also appreciate the ability to download csv files of the data to easily sort out information.

There are a lot of buttons to press to complete one task, so it is easy to accidentally click the the wrong button and archive materials and/or change the pricing without meaning.

The best thing about working with Craftybase is the customer support. At first trying to figure the program out was rather daunting but the two owners were so very approachable and helpful in their aid they gave. They are also just two incredibly kind people who have designed great software for those of us who make things. But maybe the thing I like most is the sheer scope of the program. It just seems to accommodate all of my needs. Or maybe it its calculation of my COGs. I especially like that. Get the picture? There's lots to like here.

There was one aspect of my business I was having trouble setting up in Craftybase. But then when I thought of it I had to concede that the aspect I was trying to accommodate had nothing really to do with any kind of production and therefore Craftybase wasnt even set up to accommodate this.

I was swimming in receipts, spreadsheets, and access databases before switching to Craftybase. Now I feel like my ducks are in a line and I know which direction my business is headed in.

I like that I have live time inventory data. I load in new items, can run reports on hand qtys. And see how many orders are pending for what.

I think it could be designed with a little more click and play.

Craftybase has been a great system to use for my business that needs to track material usage and costs as I manufacture my products. I have been very happy with it and its ease of use.

Ease of calculating COGS. Also, it's integration with Square Register is excellent

Wish it integrated with Squarespace. Also, the variances automatically created with imports from Square Register are not overly helpful

It simplifies the process of figuring out how much to charge on a manufactured item, it basically does my taxes for me and it allows me to know what I need to restock (products or materials) with just a click or two.

It should integrate more. You have all my user data, why can't I automatically Import it into mailchimp? Why can't I create a shopping list and export it to my local online diy shop? I also can't collate my inventory on the other platforms when something sells on another - access is read only. You could do more with what you've built. Its great - it could be amazing.

Lifesaver, timesaver.. Wish I'd had it from the very beginning of my business.

Craftybase is an easy to access, straightforward platform that keeps tabs on my 100s of items (materials & finished products) in inventory.

There are some small details that could be improved upon, and Craftybase seems to be very responsive to user input to improve these details.

Good

Ease of setup and customer service and inventory control

Adding inventory to a second store did not show correct quantity and shows -quantiys

The affordability and ability to keep track of materials used.

I would like it to be a little easier to figure out how to invoice for specific variations (expiration dates and lot numbers) of product.