What Tracker For Pottery Easy Actually Is
Tracker For Pottery Easy is a scheduling and workflow management tool built specifically for small pottery studios and independent ceramic makers. It tracks kiln cycles, orders, client communications, and inventory of raw materials all in one place. The basic version is free and covers individual potters. The paid tiers add team features and multi-studio support. Pottery workflows are messy. You have greenware sitting on shelves, kiln loads to schedule around temperature curves, orders that need to track from throwing to glazing to firing to shipping. Most potters use spreadsheets or sticky notes for this. That works until you have more than five people working together or until orders start stacking up past a hundred a month. Tracker For Pottery Easy was built to handle exactly that mess without requiring you to learn project management software designed for software teams. The software runs as a web app at trackerforpottery.com. You sign up with an email, create your first studio profile, and import any existing order data through CSV. There is no downloadable desktop version unless you pay for the enterprise plan, which includes offline syncing. The free tier gives you three kiln profiles, basic order tracking, and client contact management.
To import orders from another system, export your data as a CSV with columns matching their template. The template fields are order ID, customer name, piece type, dimensions, glaze list, kiln assignment, and estimated completion date. Anything outside those columns gets dropped during import. Do not try to map custom fields from other software without checking the import guide first. I lost two days of order history once because my CSV had extra columns that confused the parser.
Setting Up Your First Kiln Profile
Kiln profiles are the core of the system. Each kiln you own gets its own profile where you define the heating rate, peak temperature, hold times, and cooling rate. The app then uses this data to automatically schedule your next load based on when previous loads will finish. This is where it actually saves you time. Instead of guessing when the kiln will be free, the system tells you based on real firing curves. Here is a detail most people miss: the cooling phase matters as much as the firing phase for scheduling accuracy. If your kiln takes four hours to cool down after reaching temperature, the app needs to know that. Otherwise it will schedule a new load too early and your ware will crack from thermal shock. Set your cooling time conservatively. I learned this the hard way when a kiln crash destroyed three months of work because the scheduler kept overlapping loads.
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Tracking Orders Through Production
Each order in Tracker For Pottery Easy moves through stages: received, throwing, drying, bisque firing, glazing, final firing, quality check, shipping. You move an order forward by tapping the stage buttons. The dashboard shows you which orders are stuck at which stage. This is useful for spotting bottlenecks, like when glazing becomes the bottleneck because one person handles all the glazing work. For bulk production runs, use the batch ordering feature. You can create a batch of twenty identical vases and the system will track them as a group. When you fire them together in the same kiln load, all twenty orders update to the same stage at the same time. This cuts down data entry significantly. I typically process sixty to eighty pieces per batch and the system handles it without issue.
Inventory Tracking for Clay and Glaze
The inventory module tracks raw clay, glazes, and supplies. When you start a new order, you can assign which glaze and clay type goes with it. The system then deducts from your inventory. It is not perfectly accurate because you have to manually enter consumption amounts, but it is better than estimating by eye every week. A common problem is glaze waste. When you mix a new batch, you will have extra left in the bucket. The app does not automatically track that waste unless you log it. I recommend creating a daily habit of logging glaze waste before you clean your mixing area. Five minutes a day prevents the inventory from drifting more than ten percent from actual stock levels.
Limitations You Should Know About
Tracker For Pottery Easy does not integrate with major e-commerce platforms out of the box. If you sell on Shopify or Etsy and want orders to flow directly into the system, you need a third-party integration tool like Zapier, and even then it is not always reliable. I spent several weeks trying to set up a direct Shopify sync and ended up just doing manual CSV imports twice a week. It is faster than dealing with broken automation. The mobile app is functional but not great. You can add orders and move stages, but editing kiln profiles or doing bulk operations requires the desktop browser. If you work primarily from your phone while moving pieces around the studio, you will find yourself switching to a laptop frequently. The developer has said a mobile redesign is coming in the next major update, but there is no fixed timeline. Another limitation is that the free tier does not include reporting. If you want to see monthly revenue, average kiln throughput, or order turnaround time, you need the paid plan starting at twelve dollars per month per studio. For a solo potter doing under thirty orders a month, the free tier is sufficient. Above that threshold, the reporting alone justifies the cost.
Who Should Skip Tracker For Pottery Easy
If you are a hobbyist throwing a few pieces a month, this is overkill. A simple notebook or Google Sheet will serve you better. If you run a large commercial studio with fifty or more employees, you will outgrow this within a year and need an ERP system. This tool sits in the middle ground for studios with one to five people and twenty to two hundred orders per month. That is where it shines. I have been using it for about eighteen months now. The initial setup takes roughly forty minutes if your data is clean. After that, daily use takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes for order updates and kiln scheduling. The learning curve is shallow enough that I trained my assistant in a single afternoon without referring to the documentation. That is rare for project management software.
