Best Jewelry Inventory Software: The Ultimate Comparison

If you’re a small jewelry business, it’s important to realize that inventory management is key to your success and your future growth.

By taking control of your jewelry inventory using software, you can keep better track of your costs and ensure that you are not running out of any crucial components or products. Additionally, tracking your inventory can help you stay organized and plan for future production needs.

While you might be able to initially start with tracking your findings, beads, and clasps using pen and paper and a keen eye, as the sales start rolling in you’ll find this to be an almost impossible task. To keep your business in the black, you need to know what you have, what’s selling, and what needs to be ordered - in real-time.

This can be a daunting task, but luckily there are some great software options for jewelry makers out there to help you! In this article, we will discuss a couple of different software programs that can help manage your jewelry inventory to get you started on the road to organizational bliss!

Read also: How to start a jewelry business →

Jewelry Inventory Spreadsheets

Once you outgrow the “pen and paper” method, you’ll find most small jewelry businesses start to gravitate towards some sort of spreadsheet-based solution for their inventory, either making it themselves from scratch or buying one “off the shelf” that someone has already made.

You can simply get started by creating tabs for products, raw materials, orders and purchases and then use a combination of manual input and formulae to keep track of quantities. You should also download our free jewelry spreadsheet template here, if you’d like to start with a good solid example.

We will warn you that while it looks like a spreadsheet is a cheap way of managing jewelry stock levels while costs are tight, Excel is, however, not the greatest option for small jewelry businesses that are looking to scale. Excel can become cumbersome and difficult to manage as businesses grow due to its manual nature - you’ll be adding every stock change as it happens to make sure its fully up to date.

By this stage, it becomes much harder to transfer your data into a proper inventory solution. Some jewelry makers in this situation find that they need to close down operations for days so that they can count and migrate their inventory over to a new system so it’s wise to make a choice at the outset that scales with you.

Craftybase Inventory: Your Best Software Solution for Jewelry Inventory

Craftybase Jewelry Inventory Software offers a great, cost-effective solution for jewelry makers looking to track their inventory.

It is easy to use and helps keep track of all aspects of production, from materials used to finished products. Craftybase calculates all inventory in real-time, so you’ll have a complete manufacturing dashboard of your business’ stock levels whenever you need it. There are also a range of advanced inventory features such as COGS, multi-level bill of materials, component and bundle/kitting tracking, batch and lot numbers, stock location management and much more.

Best of all, its manufacturing and inventory features are designed specifically for handmade DTC makers, so you’ll most likely find that your workflow will fit seamlessly and you won’t need to find messy workarounds like some of the other solutions mentioned below.

"Being able to see in a instant all components (and the product code and where it's from) used in a particular product is a massive help." - Brett & Leni Handcrafted Jewellery

It’s completely cloud-based, and has a range of affordable plans catering for all stages of jewelry businesses. Craftybase also offers a free 14 day trial so you can see if it meets your needs before committing to a plan. Try Craftybase for 14 days >

Sortly Inventory

Sortly is another solution for jewelry makers looking to track their inventory. This solution has support for iOS and Android devices, which is great when requiring visibility on your jewelry inventory in your workshop or on the go.

Sortly, however, is a product designed to cater to a wide market of anyone looking to “track their stuff”. This can cause some issues and learning curves as you’ll need to try and shape their features around in-house jewelry making workflows. Their inventory tracking features are also quite basic, so if you need higher-level manufacturing features, you may require supplementary MRP software in addition which may be costly.

Acctivate

This cloud or hosted solution for jewelry inventory is designed as Inventory Management software for Quickbooks, enabling you to maintain using your accounting software and add inventory capabilities to it instead of adopting a completely new system. This solution has bill of materials tracking, components, and assembly features which are essential for jewelry businesses that are looking to scale.

This solution is not cheap however with a one off cost of $7,995 USD (as of Sept 2022)

Craft Maker Pro

One of the first inventory systems designed specifically for crafters, Craft Maker Pro has a solid and loyal base of users that love its installable software. It features automatic inventory and pricing tracking, among a host of other features. It is, however, a little dated, and is not available in the cloud which limits its ability to integrate with eCommerce storefronts, offer real-time updates, and offer on-the-go functionality.

As you can see, there are quite a few different options for jewelry inventory management software out there - from large enterprise options with all the “bells and whistles” to simple solutions that allow jewelry makers to simply track the basics of their inventory. No matter what type of jewelry business you have, you can be assured there’s a software solution out there that’s right for you. Have you discovered another jewelry inventory management program that we don’t know about yet? Get in touch and let us know so we can review and add to our list!