A spreadsheet can track what you bought. It can even track what you used, if you remember to subtract it. What it cannot do is tell you which lot that shea butter came from, what you paid for it, or whether the 2 kg at the back of the shelf expires next Tuesday.
That disconnect shows up at the worst times. You check the sheet before ordering, see 14 kg of coconut oil, and skip the reorder. Then you go to pour and find 6 kg, because someone used 8 kg last week and never updated the row. Or you reorder based on the number, receive another 15 kg, and now you have 29 kg of coconut oil and nowhere to put it.
The lot is the unit that matters
A material does not sit on your shelf as a single quantity. It arrives in lots, each with its own cost, its own supplier, and its own expiry date. When you record a delivery in Batchmade, each line creates a lot: 24 kg of shea butter at $14.80 / kg landed, received 12 Aug 2026, supplier lot SB-2608, expires 14 Feb 2027. The shelf shows every lot separately, and the stock total is a sum of those lots, not a number someone typed.
| Material | Lot | On hand | Landed cost | Expires |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shea butter | LOT-0219 | 18.4 kg | $14.80 / kg | 14 Feb 2027 |
| Shea butter | LOT-0186 | 2.1 kg | $13.20 / kg | 30 Nov 2026 |
| Coconut oil | LOT-0224 | 6.0 kg | $8.50 / kg | — |
Reorder points, not reorder habits
Most makers reorder on instinct or when they run out. A reorder point does the noticing for you: set a threshold per material, and when stock crosses it, the Today dashboard tells you. One nudge when the level is crossed, not a repeating nag.
The difference between a reorder point and a reminder is that the reorder point watches the ledger. If you receive a delivery and stock goes back above the threshold, the alert clears. If a production run consumes material and stock drops below, it fires. The number is always current because it comes from the lots, not from a cell you edited three weeks ago.
What the shelf is worth
At any point you can pull up the current value of everything on your shelves, materials and finished goods, on both costing bases. That number changes every time you receive stock or consume it in a run. For finished goods, stock corrections let you reconcile a specific lot against the ledger, with a reason code that carries its profit meaning through to the books.
The reason code is what makes a correction more than a number change. A shrinkage adjustment, a giveaway, or a miscount each carry a different profit meaning. When the accountant asks why inventory moved between quarters, the corrections tell a story that the numbers alone do not.
None of this is complicated. The hard part was doing it in a spreadsheet, and for most makers that spreadsheet stops working somewhere around the fortieth material or the third time you order something you already had.