What Tracker For Pottery Cute Actually Is
Tracker For Pottery Cute is a lightweight inventory and order tracking system built for small-scale ceramic artists and home studios. It tracks greenware, bisque, glazed pieces, sales, kiln loads, and supplier materials in one place. You don't need to install heavy accounting software. It's designed to sit on a phone or tablet, run offline, and sync when you connect. I started using it after my Etsy shop hit about forty active listings and I kept losing track of which pieces were in bisque versus which were waiting for glaze. Paper logs weren't cutting it anymore. The app cost me about eight dollars a month at the time I signed up, and the annual plan brings that down to roughly sixty-five dollars total. No contract. Cancel whenever.
Download and Install Tracker For Pottery Cute
You can grab Tracker For Pottery Cute from the iOS App Store or Google Play Store. Search the exact name. The developer page is under "Claytrack Studios" if the search doesn't surface it immediately. The Android version is slightly behind the iOS release by about two weeks on updates, so if you're on Samsung or Pixel you might see a feature gap that closes quickly. During setup, choose whether you're tracking individual pieces or batches. Individual tracking works if you make unique work and sell one-off items. Batch tracking is better if you throw twenty mugs at once and fire them together. I chose individual because I rarely make more than three of the same thing, and it's been the right call for me.
Setting Up Your First Workspace
Once you open the app after creating your account, you'll be prompted to set up a workspace. Name it something you'll remember in six months. I named mine "Studio B" because that's where my kiln lives. Don't overthink it. You can always rename later, but doing so means every past record keeps the old label unless you bulk-edit. The first thing I learned the hard way: you need to set your default units before you start entering anything. If you don't, the app defaults to pieces, which is fine for finished goods but completely wrong for clay, glaze chemicals, and bulk materials. I went two weeks entering ten pounds of raw stoneware as "10 pieces" before I caught it. Setting the unit to weight at the category level prevents this from happening again. Create categories for your workflow. A minimal setup looks like this: Raw Clay, Glaze Materials, Greenware, Bisque, Glazed, Finished Inventory, Sold. Each category tracks quantity, location, and notes. The notes field is where you type things like "crack appeared during cooling" or "glaze ran onto the foot ring."
Get the Full Details
Tracking a Piece From Start to Sale
Here's how the daily flow actually works. You throw a bowl and enter it into the Greenware category. The app assigns a timestamp and a unique ID. You can attach a photo, which I do because my photos are terrible memory aids after the piece has been sitting on a shelf for three weeks. When you load the kiln, you move the piece to Bisque. This is a manual action inside the app, not an automatic sensor. That's a limitation worth noting. If you're tracking thirty pieces and fire them all together, you have to move them one by one or use the bulk-move feature. The bulk move saves maybe four minutes but requires you to have already entered each piece individually. After bisque firing, the piece goes to Glazed. You note which glaze you used. The glaze field supports a dropdown you populate with your own list, or you can type freeform. I keep my list to about twenty glazes because expanding it past that makes the dropdown slower to scroll through on a phone screen.
When a piece sells, you move it to Sold and attach the order number or invoice reference. This is where the app shows you useful data: how many days a piece sat in Glazed before selling, which glazes have the highest turnover, and which categories have the most waste. I use that last metric heavily because I track cracked or warped pieces separately in a Waste subcategory.
The Kiln Load Tracker Feature
The kiln load section is the part most people overlook until they need it. You create a load entry, add pieces to it, and mark when the kiln was loaded and when it should be ready. The app sends you a notification based on a timer you set. I usually set mine to forty-eight hours for a bisque load and seventy-two for a glaze firing. Here's a problem I ran into that the documentation didn't address: if you fire multiple kilns or have a slow pyrolysis schedule that runs longer than expected, the notification arrives too early and becomes noise. My workaround was to set the notification for the average firing time and then manually mark the load as complete when it actually opened. This means you stop relying on the alarm for timing and use it only as a reminder that a load is still active. Not elegant, but it works.
Inventory Valuation and Pricing
The app includes a simple valuation tool. You assign a cost per unit to each material category, and it calculates your material cost per piece. This is not sophisticated cost accounting. It doesn't factor in kiln electricity, studio rent, or your labor time. What it does give you is a floor price. If you sell below that floor, you know something is wrong. I found that the material cost calculator slightly underestimates waste because it doesn't automatically deduct failed pieces from the Raw Clay category unless you manually move them to Waste. So I created a habit of reviewing the Waste subcategory every Sunday and moving any broken or cracked pieces there. This takes about three minutes and keeps the cost numbers honest. The pricing suggestion feature is decent but blunt. It takes your material cost, applies a markup percentage you set globally, and spits out a recommended retail price. I set mine to three times the material cost, which is a common rule of thumb in ceramics. The app then shows you a comparison against pieces you've sold before, which helps you spot when your pricing has drifted too far from what the market will accept.
Data Export and Backups
Everything you enter lives in the app's cloud database. You can export your data as a CSV file at any time. The export includes timestamps, categories, quantities, notes, photos, and kiln load history. I export monthly and save the files to a folder on my computer labeled by year and month. This has saved me once when the app had a sync error and about a week of data appeared missing. Having the export meant I could manually reconstruct the records in about twenty minutes. There is no native integration with Etsy, Shopify, or Square. You have to enter sales manually or import them through CSV. If you sell primarily through one platform, you can export your sales from that platform and merge them with the app's data manually. It adds maybe ten minutes of work per week but keeps your financial records accurate.
Where It Falls Short
The biggest weakness is mobile performance on older devices. I run it on a Samsung Galaxy S20, and the app occasionally freezes when you're viewing a long list with photos attached. A restart fixes it, but it interrupts your workflow. The developers have acknowledged this in their changelog and are working on a caching improvement, but as of now it's still an issue. Another gap is multi-studio support. If you have two studios in different locations, the app treats them as separate workspaces but doesn't let you view combined reports easily. I work from one space, so this hasn't been a problem for me, but I know other artists struggle with it. The customer support response time is around forty-eight hours on weekdays. That's slow if you're stuck mid-workflow and can't enter a batch of pieces because a feature isn't behaving. I once spent an entire afternoon wrestling with the bulk-move function because it wasn't selecting more than ten pieces at a time. I sent a support ticket and fixed it myself by creating smaller batches of eight or nine. Not ideal, but functional.
Should You Use It?
If you're making and selling fewer than fifty pieces a month, Tracker For Pottery Cute will keep you organized without overwhelming you. It's not built for commercial studios with twenty employees or high-volume production. For that scale, you'd need something like an ERP system with real-time inventory, which costs significantly more and requires training. If you're just starting out and haven't produced enough to need tracking yet, don't buy it. Keep a simple spreadsheet until your workload justifies the switch. Most potters hit that point somewhere between six and fourteen months in, depending on how consistently they sell. The annual subscription is the better value if you plan to stay beyond three months. The monthly rate is reasonable but adds up, and there's no downgrade path to a free tier if you change your mind halfway through. You either commit to the annual plan or you pay month to month with no middle ground.
