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Database Software for Your Craft Business

How to Maintain Good Business Records

You have a wonderful site full of helpful information! What I need to know is how to set up a database for my jewelry business. I have Excel and Access.

Glenda

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Thank you. We’re so pleased you like The Artful Crafter.

If all you want is a database, Microsoft Access (available as a standalone product or as part of the Microsoft Office Professional Edition, which also includes Excel) is the one (of the two programs you mention) to use.

A database allows you to search and organize your data as you wish by creating different views of the database. If you have a large amount of data and want to find a specific customer or determine how many people bought a popular style of necklace or print out mailing labels to all clients who purchased in the last six months, a database is the way to go.

It allows limited calculations on your data as well. For example, to total your sales for the past month, you would create a report of all sales for the month and ask for a total at the bottom.

Excel (available in the much less expensive Office Home & Student package) has some limited database capabilities, but its forte is calculations.

If you want to run a lot of financial reports like profitability, cost of goods or net income for any period, you might prefer Excel. As for Excel’s database capabilities, you can select a block of data and sort it by any of up to three fields.

If your needs are fairly simple and you don’t have a huge inventory to track, either of these programs would probably serve. I personally use Excel for my craft business. I have all the data I need in one file.

I create new sheets within the file when I want my information a different way. My current worksheets are:

• 1. “Product Pricing” which I use to set my selling price to make sure each item sold is profitable.
• 2. “Cash In-Out” where I track sales and business expenditures by date to make sure I am always in the black on a cash basis. I want to make sure the business is always financing itself.
• 3. “Orders” where I keep track of pending and historical orders. This allows me to prioritize my work as well as to look up customer information – especially helpful for repeat customers.
• 4. “Net Income” where I track and graph net income on a monthly basis.
• 5. “Web Prices” where I store data for comparable items which I find on the web.
• 6. “Price List” for a quick look up of current prices.
• 7. Finally, a bunch of other sheets I created for specific needs like “Items on Consignment” and “Trade Show Order Form”, but am not using right now.

Hopefully this will help you determine which program will best meet your needs. I might make one more distinction between the two that may help.

Excel puts you in control of the data. It’s intuitive and you can always see what is being calculated or searched. Of course, control also means you can inadvertently erase or mix up your data!

A database program like Excel has a user front end that hides the nuts and bolts from a beginning user. As you advance, you’ll learn how to access and manipulate the raw data if you need to. But in the beginning it may be hard to discern whether you are getting what you want when you run a report or do a search.

If you have more specific questions once you get started setting up your files, please write again.

Finally, if what I told you above leads you to believe neither Excel nor Access will meet your needs, you probably need a true business management software program.

In addition to tracking your inventory and customers, they have canned reports that can help you manage your business as well as file financials with your accountant and the IRS. This article contains my recommendations on Financial Software Programs.

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