The Craft-Business Pack
Four worksheets for the parts of a craft business that quietly lose money — pricing, licensing, material yield, and what you actually banked.
$39.00 · Sold by Indigo & Paper
Most people who sell what they make price it by looking at what the person next to them charges. That produces a number, and the number is usually wrong in the same direction: it covers the vinyl and gives away the ninety minutes.
Four sheets, for the four places the money goes missing.
What is in it
Four A4 pages.
Page one — pricing. It will not produce a number until time and overhead are in it. That is deliberate. A price that leaves out your hours is not a lower price, it is a lower wage, and the difference only shows up months later when the orders are steady and the bank balance is not. It ends in a multiplier, with an explanation of why the multiplier is not greed — it is the part that pays for the orders that go wrong.
Page two — the licence record. Four questions per font or file, the answer written down, and the date you checked it. Twelve rows. "Free for personal use" and "commercial licence included" are not two ends of one spectrum, and the expensive version of this discovery is always made after the order shipped.
Page three — material yield. Cost per finished item, not cost per roll, because nobody sells a roll. Fourteen rows, including the spacing line that almost every yield calculation leaves out and that is the reason the offcut feels free when it is not.
Page four — the order log. Quoted, cost, kept, and whether you would take the job again. Twenty rows. After twenty it is usually obvious which work is worth repeating, and it is usually not the work you expected.
Why it exists
Every other thing on this site is for somebody making something they want. This one is for somebody making something a stranger has paid for, which is a different problem with a different failure mode: not a spread that goes unused, but a year of work at an hourly rate nobody would have accepted if it had been quoted honestly up front.
The licence sheet exists because the question comes up here more than any other, and because getting it wrong is the one mistake on this list that someone else can make expensive for you.
What it is not
Not legal advice — the sheet says so on the sheet. Not accounting software, and it does not connect to your shop, because a worksheet you fill in once per order is a worksheet you will actually read.
Undated, so it does not expire.
The reasoning behind it
Four questions to ask about a font licence before you sell anything is page two, turned into a record you keep rather than a thing you read once.