Free Clothing Inventory Spreadsheet
A ready-made Excel template for clothing brands — fabric and trims tracked by the metre, finished garments tracked by style and colourway, and a cost per garment that accounts for what the cloth actually landed at.
- Fabric, trims and notions tracked in metres, yards, or units
- Finished garments with stock status per line
- Cost per garment from real landed fabric costs
- Free to download — Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers
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What's included
Built for brands that cut and sew, not just stock and ship
Most clothing inventory templates are a finished-goods list: style, size, quantity, price. That's fine if you buy garments in. If you make them, half your inventory value is sitting on a fabric roll, and none of it appears on that list.
Fabric and trims, by the metre
One row per distinct cloth — each weight, each colourway. Track in metres or yards, record the landed cost per unit, and see remaining yardage without unrolling anything.
- Separate rows per weight and colourway
- Trims, thread, labels, and packaging tracked alongside
- Calculated in-stock / out-of-stock flag
Garments by style and colourway
Finished stock gets its own tab, with retail price, on-hand quantity, and the manufacture cost carried through from the run that produced it — so margin per style is visible rather than assumed.
- SKU, style name, and category per line
- Unit price alongside unit manufacture cost
- Current and start-of-year stock valuation
Cost per garment, honestly
Record what each production run consumed — metres of each cloth, trims, labels — and the template calculates cost per garment from landed fabric costs rather than the price on the invoice.
- Fabric consumption logged per run
- Landed costs including freight and duty
- Cost per run and per garment, calculated
Template walkthrough
What each tab of the spreadsheet tracks
The workbook is divided into seven linked tabs, each covering one part of your inventory workflow. It's built to run over a single calendar year, so it can calculate your start and end-of-year inventory values. Calculated columns are shaded in the file — enter your data everywhere else and let the formulas do the work.
Material Inventory
A complete list of the fabrics and trims you hold — the foundation the rest of the workbook builds on. For each one:
- SKU and name — identify each fabric or trim clearly (e.g. "Cotton Jersey — Navy, 200gsm")
- On-hand quantity — current stock, updated as you count
- Stock status — a calculated in-stock / out-of-stock flag
- Unit cost — the fully landed cost per tracking unit
- Tracking unit — metres, yards, or units — whatever you actually produce in
- Preferred vendor — where you usually buy it
- Starting quantity and value — feeds your start-of-year valuation
Personal Use
A log for anything withdrawn from stock that didn't go into a product you sold — samples, testing, or personal use. Keeping it separate means your COGS only reflects what genuinely went into production:
- Date removed and fabric or trim — what left inventory, and when
- Quantity and unit cost — valued at the fabric or trim's landed cost
- Total cost — calculated, and deducted from your year-end tallies
Purchases
A full record of every fabric or trim purchase — one row per item bought, so five items from one supplier means five rows:
- Purchase date and vendor — when and where you bought it
- Item cost — what you paid, excluding shipping and tax
- Quantity purchased — in the fabric or trim's tracking unit
- Proportional shipping and tax — allocated per item across the order
- Landed unit cost — calculated automatically: the true cost per unit including freight
Manufactures
The step most inventory spreadsheets skip entirely: recording what you made, and which fabrics and trims each production run consumed:
- Manufacture date — when the run was made
- Garment made — SKU and name of the finished garment
- Fabrics and trims used — one row per fabric or trim consumed in the run
- Quantity used — how much to deduct from stock
- Total usage cost — calculated per row, building your cost per batch
Garment Inventory
Your finished goods — what's made, priced, and ready to sell:
- SKU, name, and category — identify each sellable garment
- Unit price — your retail price per item
- Manufacture cost — the fabric or trim cost to make one unit, tallied from your Manufactures tab
- On-hand quantity and stock status — what's actually available to sell
- Inventory values — calculated starting and current stock value
Orders
Every sale, recorded one garment per row so manufacture costs can be tallied against revenue:
- Order date and ID — match rows back to your sales channels
- Garment and quantity sold — what went out the door
- Unit manufacture cost — feeds your COGS tally for the year
- Tax and shipping — proportional amounts per line item
- Totals — calculated line totals and grand totals
Reports
The tab that makes the rest worth maintaining — your key totals, tallied automatically through the year. Every figure here is calculated:
- Revenue totals — orders and tax, from your Orders tab
- Expense totals — purchases and tax, from your Purchases tab
- Inventory valuation — start-of-year value, plus purchases, less personal use and cost of garment sold
- Year-to-date inventory total — the number your accountant asks for at tax time
Every inventory figure is derived from the unit costs you enter during the year, so the accuracy of your reports depends on the accuracy of those costs.
Know what every garment costs to make
Download the free spreadsheet and you'll have fabric stock, production runs, and cost per garment tracked from today — no software required.
Download the free spreadsheet →Why clothing inventory is harder than it looks
Clothing inventory has a multiplication problem. A single style in four sizes and three colourways is twelve lines of finished stock — and behind those twelve lines sit three distinct fabrics, plus thread, interfacing, labels, and packaging, each bought in a different unit and consumed in fractions.
That's why a finished-goods list stops being useful quite quickly. It tells you that you have eleven navy tees left. It doesn't tell you whether you have the cloth to cut another run, what the last run actually cost you per unit, or whether the style is carrying its weight once freight on the fabric is counted.
The template handles both halves. Fabrics and trims live in the material register with their own tracking units, so you can hold cloth in metres and thread in units without either figure lying to you. Production runs record what was consumed and produce a cost per garment. Finished garments carry that cost through to the orders tab, so margin per style falls out of the same records rather than needing a separate exercise.
One honest limitation worth naming up front: the workbook tracks stock at the level of rows you create, so if you need size-level stock you'll be creating a row per size — workable at a handful of styles, unwieldy at thirty. That ceiling is the usual reason clothing brands move to software.
Who uses this
Who should use this clothing inventory template?
Built for businesses that produce garments in small runs — in-house, or with a maker or small factory doing the sewing.
Independent clothing labels
Small drops, a handful of styles, fabric bought a roll at a time. The point where knowing your cost per garment starts changing what you charge.
Cut-and-sew studios
Producing in-house means fabric consumption per run is knowable exactly — and worth recording, because it's what turns a quote into a margin.
Merch and print-run businesses
Blanks in, printed stock out. The materials tab handles blanks, ink, and packaging; the manufactures tab records what each print run consumed.
Brands selling on more than one channel
Orders from a website and a marketplace drawing on the same stock pool. The orders tab keeps one running total instead of two partial ones.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this free clothing inventory spreadsheet include?
Seven linked tabs: Material Inventory for fabric, trims and notions; Personal Use for stock withdrawn outside production; Purchases with landed costs; Manufactures recording what each run consumed; Product Inventory for finished garments; Orders for sales; and Reports, which tallies revenue, expenses, and inventory valuation. Delivered as an Excel file that also opens in Google Sheets and Numbers.
How do I track fabric by colour or weight in the spreadsheet?
Each row in the Material Inventory tab is one distinct material, so create a separate row per colourway and per weight. Use the name and description columns to carry the specifics — "Cotton Jersey — Navy, 200gsm" — and set the tracking unit to metres or yards, whichever you buy in. Two cloths that differ only in colour will usually have the same unit cost but consume independently, which is exactly why they need separate lines.
Can I track sizes with this template?
Yes, but manually — you create one row per size in the Product Inventory tab, the same way you would for a colourway. There's no automatic size grid. That's workable across a few styles and becomes unwieldy fast: four sizes across three colourways is twelve rows for a single style, and each needs its own count and its own manufacture cost. If you're running a full size range across a growing collection, this is the limitation that will push you towards software with variant support.
How do I work out the cost of one garment?
Record the production run in the Manufactures tab with a row per material consumed — metres of each cloth, thread, labels, packaging — each valued at its landed unit cost. Sum those and divide by the number of garments the run produced. Two things people commonly leave out and shouldn't: freight and duty on imported cloth, which the purchases tab allocates for you, and offcuts, which mean the metres you consumed exceed the metres in the finished garments.
Is it free, and does it work in Google Sheets?
Free, with no payment and no trial expiry — enter your email above and we'll send the download link and a written instruction guide. It's an Excel file that opens in Google Sheets and Apple Numbers with formulas intact. You'll also get occasional emails from us on inventory and costing for product businesses; unsubscribe whenever they stop being useful.
When should I move off the spreadsheet?
Three signals, and clothing brands usually hit them in this order: the size-and-colourway grid outgrows manual rows; you start selling on a second channel and orders need re-keying; and you're updating the workbook more than once a week. Stocksmith handles variants properly, syncs orders from Shopify, Etsy and other channels, and deducts fabric automatically against a bill of materials when a garment sells — so cost per style stays current without the maintenance.
When you outgrow the spreadsheet
Stocksmith handles the size grid for you
The spreadsheet holds up well while you're running a few styles. What breaks it is the multiplication — every new colourway and size is another row to count, another manufacture cost to maintain, another line to reconcile after every sale.
Stocksmith runs the same workflow with variants built in. Set a bill of materials once per style and fabric comes out of stock automatically when a garment is made or sold. Orders sync from your sales channels. Cost per style stays current as cloth prices move.
The discipline transfers directly — same fabrics, same units, same costing logic, minus the row maintenance.
No credit card required. Takes hours to set up, not weeks.
With the spreadsheet
- One row per size per colourway, maintained by hand
- Fabric deducted manually after every cut
- Orders from each channel re-keyed by hand
- Cost per style frozen at whatever cloth last cost
With Stocksmith
- Sizes and colourways handled as product variants
- Fabric deducted automatically against a bill of materials
- Orders synced from Shopify, Etsy, Faire, and more
- Cost per style recalculated as cloth prices move
Related resources
Free Template
Fabric Inventory Spreadsheet
The same workbook framed around the cloth itself — yardage on hand, cost per metre, and consumption per cut.
Free Template
Apparel Inventory Spreadsheet
Framed for apparel lines carrying finished stock across styles, sizes, and sales channels.
Free Template
Inventory & COGS Spreadsheet
The same tracking, framed around producing a defensible cost of goods sold figure at year end.