Computer Program for us people?

[keniasoapboutique]

I'm an Application Developer by trade. More specifically, a Database Programmer. That means I see things in rows and columns constantly. Everything must be categorized, numeralized, and has it's place.

I was wondering if there was a retail (or even custom made) PC program that can track supplier prices and tie them to your product pricing.

We have 'recipes' for each of our products. EX: One 4.75 oz bar of soap is made up of this much lye, this much essential oil, this much fragrance, etc. Then we add packaging, ribbons, and any printing that we do and we come up with an aggregate of what it costs us to make ONE bar of soap. We use that number to do our final pricing for retail and wholesale.

Each of those components, everything from the main ingredients to the packaging, has an individual price. These prices are different from supplier to supplier. Tracking all of the suppliers, and their current prices for each product would be a bit time consuming, but if it saves a few or even a few hundred dollars on a potentially large order, I think it's worth it.

Currently, we're part Excel spreadsheet and part calculator to do this. We haven't outpriced ourselves on anything yet, but that's my fear, that we'll end up not calculating correctly and then selling something for a lot less than we should.

I'd love to write something that tracks these things, but I simply don't have the time. My question is, how does everyone else do it? How do you keep track of your ingredient prices and tie them to your product prices? Do you even do that? If you find an easier or cheaper way to produce your items, do you pass those savings on to your consumers? Currently, we do it for wholesale buyers, but constantly fluxing retail prices don't look good.

[RobinInOR]

I don't change my retail prices very often anyway, so I only check supply costs vs retail 2ce a year. I do it in excel - I've got a sheet for basic costs (including shipping), then sheets that detail the formulas/amounts that calculate cost per. Then I have a summary sheet, one line per product, that splits out material, packaging, and has a range of markup points, with retail and wholesale estimates and actuals.

[sudsnwicks]

I do know of this program you can use:

www.soapmaker.ca

As for me, I just do it the old fashioned way with a few spreadsheets.

[cas]

I was doing things in Excel and finally broke down and wrote a front end application (backend SQL) to do everything for me. Much easier to keep track of everything when it's in a database!