Templates for Makers.

A curated set of 19 workbooks — and the guides that go with them — for people who make the thing themselves. Cost a batch from what it actually consumes, keep a materials drawer that counts itself down, and price a catalog that still holds when a supplier raises a price.

Costed at the bench, not at the till

Most selling advice starts after the thing exists. This collection starts before it does — at the pour, the kiln, the bench pin, the needles, the print bed. That is where the numbers that decide your margin are actually set, and where a generic pricing template stops being useful: you buy wax by the pound and pour it by the jar, silver by the troy ounce and set it by the gram, glaze by the bucket and brush it by the piece.

So these are per-craft files. Each one knows the units its craft is really bought and spent in, keeps the batch and lot records that craft needs, and turns them into a cost per unit you can defend — then into a price you can hold at any counter. If you want the selling side instead, the craft-seller and Etsy-seller collections cover the table and the shop.

And if you want the studio side whole rather than a file at a time, the Maker’s Complete Business System gathers fourteen of these into one purchase — start it, run it, price it, sell it, handle it, cover it — with a control panel that routes each job to the right file and works out the one number none of them can see on its own: what an hour of your work is actually paying you.

Some of the hours on a bench are not yours at all — they belong to a machine. A laser, a printer or a CNC bed costs real money for every hour it runs: the tube or module wearing towards its replacement, the purchase price spread across the hours it will work, and the draw at the wall. What machine-hour cost is sets out that arithmetic, and how to price laser-engraved products walks one piece from the sheet it was cut out of through to a price you can hold — the CO2-versus-diode comparison is why two machines in the same room do not cost the same per job. The free settings and material test log keeps the settings that produced a good burn, so the next one is not guesswork.

And when the bench stops being yours alone — a first helper, a week away, an order that has to go out while you are ill — the method has to come out of your head and onto a page. Start with what an SOP is and what a work instruction adds, then how to write one somebody else can follow. The free one-page SOP template is the form itself, shown filled in.

Then there is the part of the year the bench cannot help with. When a marketplace processes enough of your sales to cross the reporting threshold, it sends you and the IRS a 1099-K reporting gross payment volume — everything it processed for you, before a single fee, refund or shipping charge comes out — which is why the figure is usually bigger than the money that reached your bank, and why nothing on the form explains the gap. Plenty of shops stay under the threshold and get no form at all — though some processors send one below any threshold anyway, and the income is taxable either way. Alongside that, marketplace facilitator laws generally mean the platform already collected and remitted sales tax on the sales you made through that platform — but not on your own website, your craft-fair table or your wholesale invoices.

Start by checking whether a form is even coming, with the free 1099-K threshold tracker, then work through reconciling an Etsy 1099-K to what actually hit your bank. The Sales-Tax & 1099-K Reconciliation Workbook does that arithmetic for you, and an owned file against bookkeeping software weighs the two ways of doing it. All of it is general information, not tax advice — thresholds and rules change, so check current figures with the IRS or a tax professional.