Setting Up Your Production Schedule Without Losing Your Mind
Pottery Planner Easy is a scheduling and production management tool designed specifically for studio potters and small ceramic businesses. It was built to replace the whiteboards, spreadsheets, and sticky notes that most of us accumulate within the first six months of selling work. The core idea is straightforward: you map out your kiln loads, track which pieces are drying, bisque firing, glazing, or waiting for pickup, and generate a clean calendar view so you actually know what is happening tomorrow. The setup process takes about ten minutes. You create a studio account, add your wheel, kilns, and workstations as resources, then start entering jobs. Each job represents a batch of work — a plate order, a vase commission, a studio run of mugs. You assign dates, select which kiln it goes into, and tag the pieces with their stage. The interface is clean. There is no learning curve, which is both its strength and its weakness, as I will explain later. I used this system heavily during a two-year period when I was running a solo studio and fulfilling about forty orders a month. The biggest advantage is that it forces you to be explicit about your timeline. When I stopped using it, I fell back into the habit of throwing shapes and hoping they dried fast enough for the next firing. I lost three commissions that year because I had no record of when a piece was actually expected to be done.
How the workflow actually functions
You start by creating a job. This is not a single item. A job is a grouping — say, twelve mugs for a gallery show. You set a target completion date, assign the job to a specific kiln, and break it into stages. Drying takes two days. Bisque firing takes one day plus cooling. Glazing takes half a day. The tool then calculates backward from your deadline and highlights any stage that is behind schedule in red. If you are more than four days out from a deadline, the system sends a notification. I find that notification useful. Most potters would rather have the anxiety be external than internal. One thing that trips people up is the assumption that drying time is a fixed number. It is not. In my studio, a thick-bodied bowl in winter takes three to four days to dry. The same bowl in July dries in one day because the space is already heated and the air is dry. Pottery Planner Easy lets you set custom drying and firing durations per job type, but most beginners just leave the defaults. You should not. I went through a whole month where every single job was flagged late because I was running summer drying conditions in December with the default settings still active. I changed the drying time for all heavy work from forty-eight hours to ninety-six and the red flags disappeared. You need to calibrate this against your actual environment, not the software manual.
What the tool handles well and where it falls apart
The kiln scheduling engine is solid. It prevents you from double-booking a kiln and shows you capacity utilization at a glance. If you run two kilns, you can see which one is carrying the heavier load over any given week. The reporting section generates a simple production summary you can email to wholesale buyers or gallery contacts. That feature alone saved me about twenty minutes a week on administrative work. Where the system is fragile is around irregular workflow. I once had a situation where a large commission got split across three different months because the buyer wanted staggered deliveries. The tool assumes each job has one completion date. I worked around it by creating three separate jobs with linked notes in the description field, which is clumsy. There is no native way to link jobs or create sub-jobs inside the platform. It works, but it feels like a workaround that you do not need when you are in the middle of loading a kiln and your hands are wet. Another limitation: the mobile experience is functional but not polished. I rely on logging entries from my phone while I move between the throwing area and the glaze room. The interface is cramped on a small screen. Tapping the right fields requires two tries sometimes. It does not crash or lose data, so it is acceptable, but it is clearly designed for desktop first. If you are primarily on mobile, plan to do your scheduling updates at a desk or laptop instead of on the studio floor.
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Cost and alternatives
Pottery Planner Easy runs on a subscription model. It is not free. For a solo potter doing under twenty jobs a month, the cost is reasonable. For someone running a larger studio with six kilns and multiple full-time assistants, the price scales up, and you might find that a shared spreadsheet or a more generic project management tool like Notion or Airtable covers your needs at lower cost. Those tools lack the ceramic-specific workflows though — no kiln templates, no drying time logic, no firing sequence tracking. If you need those things, the subscription pays for itself quickly. If you do not have a complex production schedule and mostly just throw for personal use, the tool is overkill. A paper calendar and a well-maintained notebook will serve you fine. The value is in the automation of reminders and the visual clarity of your workload. If you are missing deadlines or losing track of which pieces are where, it is worth the trial period. There is a free trial available on their website. I would suggest running it for three weeks with real jobs before committing. Do not test it with placeholder data. Enter actual upcoming work. That is the only way to tell whether the system fits your rhythm or just adds another thing you have to manage.
