Maybe you’ve been making and selling jewelry for awhile, or perhaps you’ve recently decided to turn your hobby into a business. Starting a jewelry design business is a great way to make a full- or part-time income, but in order to be successful you need to stay organized.
There are several steps to starting a small business:
- Create a business plan
- Get a business license
- Develop strategies to organize and manage your business
- Find platforms to sell your product
- Advertise and market your business/product
- Create and sell your product
The jewelry design business is a little different. Jewelry artists need to create their products before they start getting orders. They need the inventory to advertise online, sell at craft shows, take to trade shows, and generate bulk orders. Since a jewelry design business starts with making the product, an important next step becomes developing strategies to organize and manage the business. That’s where art inventory software becomes essential.
Staying organized is key, and software for jewelry makers helps you organize your business from the get-go with an inventory management system that tracks your parts for you as you order supplies and use them to create pieces. A lot of small pieces and materials can go into a single piece of jewelry, and when your volume starts increasing, it’s easy to lose track of everything, making it difficult to price your pieces accordingly.
Jewelry software also tracks information about each piece you make, including the parts and prices of each, to help you stay on top of pricing, cost margins, and inventory of finished pieces. And it does a whole lot more than that. Jewelry accounting software tracks each step of the four part process that goes into each piece of jewelry you make to sell: creating it, pricing it, selling it, and making a profit.
Creating: During the creation phase, jewelry design software records information about the piece you’re making: the parts used to make it, the cost of each part, and time spent on the project. When you want to order more parts or recreate the piece, all the information you need is at your fingertips.
Pricing: Recording information during the creation phase makes pricing easy. The software will tell you what it cost to make the piece, including the cost of your time based on an hourly rate.
Selling: When you make a sale, the software records the money made from the sale for accounting purposes, and gives you reports on your profit margins. It also adjusts your inventory of finished pieces to help you track the number of pieces you currently have available for sale.
Profits: Tracking your profits is seamless, and you’ll be so thankful for your software when tax season rolls around. All the information you need to report profits and take deductions on business expenses is available instantly, recorded, organized, and stored by your software.
Software comes with an online backup system for safety, so you’ll always have access to your jewelry business information, even if you don’t have your personal computer.
