Why I Track My Pottery Month by Month

Most potters I know don't track their work at all. They fire when they feel like it, sell what comes, and guess their costs when tax season hits. That works fine until you realize you've been making zero-profit bowls for six months straight because you never actually logged the clay, glaze, and electricity behind each piece. A Monthly Pottery Tracker is just a spreadsheet or notebook system where you record inputs and outputs once per month. That's it. The whole thing. I started building one about four years ago after a kiln failure cost me roughly two hundred dollars in lost work. I had no idea which pieces were in that firing because I didn't write anything down. Since then, my tracking has gotten more boring and more useful every year.

Monthly Pottery Tracker Setup

Here's the actual system I use. It lives in Google Sheets and takes about ten minutes to set up, thirty minutes per month to maintain. Column A is the date. Column B is the project name or wheel batch. Column C is clay weight used. Column D is glaze weight used. Columns E through G are electricity hours, gas units, and water gallons for that session. Column H is pieces produced. Column I is pieces sold that month. Column J is revenue. Column K calculates cost per piece automatically. I learned the hard way that if your spreadsheet doesn't have a total row at the bottom, you'll stop using it. Add SUM formulas for every numeric column and reference that bottom row in a summary tab. Most people skip this step and then wonder why their tracker dies after three weeks. One edge case that isn't obvious: glaze waste. When you dip a batch of twenty cups, you're going to have leftover glaze in the bucket. If you only log what goes on the pots, your cost per unit will look artificially low. I track a "batch waste" column that I estimate at fifteen percent of total glaze used per firing. It's a rough number but it keeps my margins honest. The trick that actually changed my business was tracking by firing, not by piece. Early on I recorded individual items and got confused about which glaze went with which kiln load. Switching to a firing-level view cut my logging time from forty minutes per month to under fifteen. Each row became one kiln load instead of one cup. You can grab a bare-bones template if you want. It's linked below. I don't update it often because the structure rarely needs changing. Download Monthly Pottery Tracker Template (Excel)

What the Numbers Actually Tell You

A lot of potters treat their tracker like a diary entry. They fill it out and never look at it again. The value shows up only when you compare months against each other. My first real insight came from comparing February to March. Both months had similar firing counts, but February cost me thirty-eight percent more per piece. The difference wasn't clay or glaze. It was a smaller kiln load size because I had fewer ready pieces and fired at lower density. The electricity and gas per unit went up significantly even though my total bill didn't change much. That's the kind of thing that's invisible without a Monthly Pottery Tracker because your eye reads "same kiln, same price" and your brain files it under no news. Another counter-intuitive thing: selling price has almost nothing to do with your material cost. Your labor is the variable. If you're spending three hours throwing twenty mugs and selling them for two hundred dollars total, your material cost might be twelve dollars. But your hourly rate isn't reflected anywhere in that spreadsheet unless you add a labor column. I added one later. It's just hours logged multiplied by a target hourly rate I set at twenty-five dollars. Pieces that don't cover materials plus labor are what I call "loss leaders" and I flag them in red. Most of my best-selling forms are actually in the red on paper until you factor in repeat orders and wholesale margins. The tracker also caught a problem I had with over-glazing. I was using twice as much ten-percent cobalt carbonate as I thought because I was recording the weight of the dry powder, not the weight of the batch solution. Switching to recording solution weight instead of raw material weight fixed the discrepancy entirely. This is one of those details beginners miss because they're focused on the bigger picture, but it matters when you're trying to reproduce a consistent color across three firings.

Pitfalls and Where the System Breaks

The main failure mode is inconsistency. I've seen potters who track perfectly for six weeks and then stop because a busy month made them skip the logging. The next month they don't pick it back up because they feel guilty about the gap. Just accept the gap and continue. Your data is still useful even if it has holes. Another limitation: this system doesn't capture time spent on marketing, shipping, or studio maintenance. Those are real costs too. I keep a separate monthly expenses sheet for those and link it to the main tracker with a simple IF formula that adds them to the total overhead. You also need to decide early whether you're tracking for profit calculation or for creative planning. They're different goals and they produce different spreadsheet structures. Profit tracking wants tight cost precision. Creative planning wants to show you which glazes and forms you're actually using so you can stop buying materials you never touch. I run both views in the same file on separate tabs because switching contexts every month was driving me crazy. If you're making one-of-a-kind work at low volume, a simple notebook might be better than a spreadsheet. The formula overhead isn't worth the effort if you're only firing three times a year. But if you're doing more than that, the tracker pays for itself in the first month by catching waste you'd otherwise repeat. The template link is above if you want to start with something that already has the formulas baked in.