Free Fabric Inventory Spreadsheet
A ready-made Excel template for tracking cloth properly — yardage on hand per fabric and colourway, cost per metre including freight, and how much each cut actually consumed. Seven linked tabs, no formula-building required.
- Yardage on hand per cloth, weight, and colourway
- Cost per metre or yard including freight and duty
- Consumption logged per cut, offcuts included
- Free to download — Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers
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What's included
Cloth is inventory, and it behaves differently to everything else
Fabric is bought by the roll and used by the metre, arrives with freight attached, and gets consumed in quantities that never quite match what ends up in the finished piece. A generic stock list handles none of that. This one is built for it.
Every cloth on one register
One row per distinct fabric — each fibre, weight, and colourway held separately, because they consume independently even when they cost the same. On-hand yardage with a calculated stock flag.
- Fibre, weight, and colourway in name and description
- Remaining yardage per cloth
- Preferred mill or supplier recorded per line
Cost per metre, landed
A roll invoiced at one price and shipped internationally costs something else per metre. The purchases tab allocates freight, duty and tax across the order and calculates a landed cost per unit for you.
- Freight and duty spread proportionally
- Landed cost per metre or yard, calculated
- Full purchase history, so price moves are visible
What each cut consumed
Log the metres a run drew down — including offcuts, which is where most fabric costings quietly understate themselves. The template turns that into a material cost per finished piece.
- Metres consumed recorded per production run
- Total fabric cost per run and per unit
- Samples and personal use logged separately
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 you hold — the foundation the rest of the workbook builds on. For each one:
- SKU and name — identify each fabric clearly (e.g. "Linen — Oatmeal, 190gsm")
- 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 — what left inventory, and when
- Quantity and unit cost — valued at the fabric's landed cost
- Total cost — calculated, and deducted from your year-end tallies
Purchases
A full record of every fabric 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'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 each production run consumed:
- Manufacture date — when the run was made
- Product made — SKU and name of the finished product
- Fabrics used — one row per fabric consumed in the run
- Quantity used — how much to deduct from stock
- Total usage cost — calculated per row, building your cost per batch
Product Inventory
Your finished goods — what's made, priced, and ready to sell:
- SKU, name, and category — identify each sellable product
- Unit price — your retail price per item
- Manufacture cost — the fabric 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 product per row so manufacture costs can be tallied against revenue:
- Order date and ID — match rows back to your sales channels
- Product 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 product 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 exactly what cloth you have and what it cost
Download the free spreadsheet and you'll have a fabric register, a landed cost history, and consumption per cut tracked from today — no software required.
Download the free spreadsheet →How to track fabric by the yard in a spreadsheet
The mechanics are straightforward once the units are right. Set the tracking unit for each fabric to metres or yards — whichever you buy in — and record the unit cost in that same unit. Every time you cut, log the quantity consumed in the manufactures tab. The template deducts against your register and adds the cost to that production run.
Two details do most of the work. The first is treating each cloth variant as its own line. A 200gsm jersey in navy and the same jersey in ecru will usually share a unit cost, but they run out at different rates — and one row averaging both tells you nothing useful about either.
The second is recording what you consumed rather than what ended up in the garment. Cutting a run of six from a marker leaves offcuts. Those metres left your roll and they belong in the cost of that run, otherwise your cost per piece is quietly optimistic by whatever your wastage rate happens to be — typically not a rounding error.
Then keep the on-hand column honest with a periodic count. Cloth is unusually prone to drift because it's consumed in fractions and measured by hand; a monthly walk of the shelf against the register catches the gap before it becomes a stockout mid-run. Counting a portion of your cloths each month, rather than everything once a year, is what makes that sustainable — and the reorder point you derive from your consumption history is only as good as the counts behind it.
Who uses this
Who should use this fabric inventory template?
Anyone holding cloth as stock and turning it into something else — where yardage, cost per metre, and consumption all need to hold up.
Clothing and accessory brands
Cloth is usually the largest line in a garment's cost. Tracking it per metre at landed cost is what makes a cost per style defensible rather than approximate.
Home textile and soft-goods makers
Cushions, bedding, bags — high yardage per unit and multiple cloths per product. The manufactures tab keeps each run's consumption attributable.
Textile and workroom operations
A shared register with defined columns is a system more than one person can run — and the cleanest possible starting point for a later move into software.
Anyone valuing cloth for year end
Rolls on a shelf are inventory with a value your accountant will ask for. Yardage times landed cost, recorded through the year, beats reconstructing it in April.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a fabric inventory spreadsheet track?
Each fabric you hold, with fibre and weight, colourway, yardage on hand, landed cost per metre or yard, supplier, and stock status. This template adds tabs for purchases (with freight allocated), production runs and what they consumed, finished-goods stock, orders, and a reports tab that tallies your inventory valuation and cost of goods sold across the year.
How do I track fabric by the yard?
Set the tracking unit to "yards" (or metres) in the material tab and enter the landed cost per yard as the unit cost. Each time you cut, record the quantity used in the manufactures tab — the template calculates the cost of that consumption and you decrement the on-hand column. Keep the on-hand figure honest with a periodic count; cloth drifts more than most stock because it's measured by hand and consumed in fractions.
Should offcuts and wastage count in my fabric cost?
Yes. Record the metres that left the roll, not the metres that ended up in the finished piece. Those offcuts are paid for and they belong in the cost of that run — excluding them understates your cost per unit by your whole wastage rate, which for a fitted garment can be meaningfully more than a rounding error. If you want to see wastage explicitly, note the finished-piece yardage in the description and let the difference be visible.
Can I use it in Google Sheets?
Yes. It's delivered as an Excel (.xlsx) file that opens in Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, and anything else that reads the Excel format — upload it to Drive and open with Sheets, and the formulas carry across. Sheets is the better choice if more than one person cuts fabric, since the register only works when whoever consumed the cloth is the one recording it.
What are the limitations of tracking fabric in Excel?
Nothing deducts itself. Fabric comes off the register only when someone remembers to type it, there's no warning when a cloth is about to run short, and orders from your sales channels don't sync in. It also scales badly across colourways — every new variant is another row to maintain in two places. It's a genuinely good starting system; it stops being one somewhere around a few dozen active cloths or a second sales channel.
How does Stocksmith handle fabric inventory?
You set a bill of materials per product specifying how many metres of each cloth it takes. When you record a manufacture — or when a sale comes in from a connected channel — the fabric comes out of stock automatically at its current landed cost. You get low-stock alerts before a cloth runs short, and cost per style recalculates as fabric prices move. Start a free 14-day trial.
When you outgrow the spreadsheet
Stocksmith deducts fabric as you use it
The register works exactly as well as your memory does. Every cut has to be typed in, every count reconciled by hand, and the numbers are current only as of the last time someone sat down with the file.
Stocksmith runs the same workflow with the deductions automated. Define a bill of materials per product and cloth comes out of stock at its real landed cost whenever a piece is made or sold. Orders sync from your sales channels, and you get told a fabric is running low before it stops a run.
The discipline transfers directly — same cloths, same units, same costing logic, minus the typing.
No credit card required. Takes hours to set up, not weeks.
With the spreadsheet
- Yardage deducted by hand after every cut
- No warning before a cloth runs short mid-run
- A new colourway means new rows in two places
- Cost per metre frozen at whatever you last typed
With Stocksmith
- Fabric deducted automatically against a bill of materials
- Low-stock alerts before a cloth stops a run
- Colourways handled as variants, not duplicate rows
- Landed cost per metre recalculated with every purchase
Related resources
Free Template
Clothing Inventory Spreadsheet
The same workbook framed around finished garments — styles, colourways, and cost per garment.
Free Template
Material Tracking Spreadsheet
The general-purpose version, for operations tracking materials beyond cloth alone.
Guide
The Reorder Point Formula
Turn the consumption history in your register into a reorder point that accounts for supplier lead times.