A ready-made Excel template for tracking the materials you buy, the products you make from them, and what it all costs. Seven linked tabs cover material stock, purchases, manufactures, finished products, orders, and end-of-year COGS — so you can build real inventory discipline before you invest in software.
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What's included
Most inventory spreadsheets only count finished stock. This one is built for businesses that make things — it connects the materials you buy to the products you manufacture, so your stock levels and costs actually reflect how your business works.
Separate inventory tabs for raw materials and finished products, linked by your manufactures. See at a glance what's on the shelf, what's running low, and what's out of stock.
Every production process is different. Track each material in whatever unit you actually manufacture in — grams, millilitres, ounces, metres, or individual units — so your cost calculations stay accurate.
The numbers most product businesses guess at, generated for you: landed unit costs from your purchases, material cost per manufacture, and the inventory valuation tallies you need for COGS at tax time.
Template walkthrough
The spreadsheet is divided into seven linked tabs, each covering one part of your inventory workflow. It's designed to be used over a single calendar year, so it can calculate your start and end-of-year inventory values. Calculated columns are highlighted in the file — enter your data everywhere else and let the formulas do the work.
Your complete raw material list — the foundation the rest of the spreadsheet builds on. For each material:
A full record of every material purchase — one row per material bought, so five items from one supplier means five rows:
The step most inventory spreadsheets skip entirely: recording what you make and the materials each production run consumes:
Your finished goods — what's made, priced, and ready to sell:
Every sale, recorded one product per row so manufacture costs can be tallied against revenue:
A log for materials withdrawn from inventory for anything other than production — samples, testing, or personal use. Keeping these out of your production costs means:
The tab that makes the rest worth maintaining — your key totals, tallied automatically through the year:
Download the free spreadsheet and you'll have a working material, product, and COGS tracking system in place today — no software required.
Download the free spreadsheet →Raw material inventory management is the process of tracking the materials you use to make your products — quantities on hand, unit costs, suppliers, and consumption in production.
For a product business, it answers three questions that retail-style inventory tracking can't: what materials do I have right now, what did they actually cost me to buy (including shipping), and how much of them has gone into the products I've made? Get those right and everything downstream — pricing, reorder timing, COGS at tax time — stops being guesswork.
Done well, it means you spot low stock before it stops a production run, you know your real cost per batch as material prices shift, and your end-of-year inventory valuation comes from records rather than reconstruction. This spreadsheet covers those fundamentals; for the full picture, read our Complete Guide to Raw Material Inventory Management.
Who uses this
This template is built for small-batch product businesses that buy raw materials and transform them into finished products — and want to build proper inventory habits before (or instead of) investing in software.
Formulated products mean long ingredient lists — butters, oils, actives, preservatives, packaging components. The materials tab keeps every input costed and counted, so a missing emulsifier never stalls a production run.
Ingredient prices move constantly, which quietly erodes margins. Logging purchases with landed costs shows you what each batch really costs to make — not what it cost six months ago.
Wax, fragrance oils, wicks, vessels — bought in bulk, used in fractions. Tracking materials in the unit you actually pour in keeps your per-candle costs honest.
Oils, lye, fragrance, colourants — each batch draws on a dozen materials. The manufactures tab records what every run consumed, so stock levels and batch costs stay connected.
High-value raw ingredients make accurate tracking worth real money. Knowing exactly what's on hand — and what it cost landed — prevents both over-ordering and production delays.
If you make what you sell, your accountant needs a COGS figure built from real inventory records. This spreadsheet produces it as a by-product of tracking you should be doing anyway.
Raw material inventory management is the process of tracking the stock of materials you use to make your products — including quantities on hand, unit costs, supplier details, and consumption in production. For small manufacturers, this means knowing exactly what you have, what it cost to buy, and how much has been used in each production run — so you never run out mid-order or over-invest in stock sitting idle on shelves.
Raw material inventory covers the ingredients and components you purchase to make products — things like wax, fragrance oil, shea butter, or packaging. Finished goods inventory covers the completed products ready to sell — the candles, soap bars, or jars of sauce in your stockroom. This spreadsheet tracks both: the Material Inventory tab for raw inputs and the Product Inventory tab for finished stock, with the Manufactures tab linking them together.
Calculate your landed unit cost for each material — that's the purchase price plus proportional shipping and tax, divided by the quantity purchased. Then, for each product you make, multiply the quantity of each material used by its landed unit cost and sum the results. This gives you the total material cost per manufacture, which feeds directly into your COGS calculation at tax time. The spreadsheet performs these calculations for you as you log purchases and manufactures.
The biggest limitations are manual data entry, no real-time sync with sales channels, and difficulty scaling beyond a modest number of materials. Spreadsheets don't alert you when stock is running low, don't automatically deduct materials when you record a manufacture, and can quietly develop formula errors as they grow. They're a solid starting point, but most growing product businesses outgrow them within 12–18 months.
Yes. The template is delivered as an Excel file that also opens in Google Sheets and Apple Numbers with its formulas intact. Enter your email address above and we'll send you a download link along with the online instruction guide. The spreadsheet is designed to cover a single calendar year — at year end, you create a fresh copy, carry over your material and product tabs, and update the starting quantities.
Stocksmith is built for small manufacturers and automatically deducts raw materials from stock every time you record a manufacture — no manual updates. It syncs orders from Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, Amazon, Square, and Faire so stock levels update in real time, recalculates your landed material costs with every purchase, and generates the COGS and inventory valuation reports you need at tax time. Everything this spreadsheet does by hand, done automatically. Start a free 14-day trial.
When you outgrow the spreadsheet
The spreadsheet gets you started — and for a while, it's genuinely enough. But every row is manual: every purchase logged by hand, every manufacture deducted by hand, every stock count reconciled by hand.
Stocksmith runs the same workflow — materials, purchases, manufactures, products, orders — as connected software. Record a production run and materials are deducted automatically at their real landed cost. Orders sync in from your sales channels. Stock levels and unit costs stay current without you maintaining them.
The discipline you build with this spreadsheet transfers directly — Stocksmith just removes the data entry that comes with it.
No credit card required. Takes hours to set up, not weeks.
With the spreadsheet
With Stocksmith
Guide
Everything small manufacturers need to know — tracking techniques, valuation methods, reorder points, and COGS.
Guide
How to calculate when to reorder each material from your average demand and supplier lead times — so stockouts stop surprising you.
Free Template
A GMP-ready Excel template for documenting production batches — ingredients, lot numbers, QC results, and sign-off.