What Soap Making Paperwork Do You Need To Organize To Track Everything?

When you first start a soap making business, it is important to organize not only your soap making supplies but all your paperwork you will need too. While you can keep recipes and invoices on your computer or on a flash drive, you should have hard copies of everything which you could place in a file folder or loose-leaf binder. What soap making paperwork should you organize to keep better keep track of your business?

Inventory

You certainly can keep a record of your inventory on your computer or flash drive, but what happens if your computer suddenly crashes? It's possible you could lose the records of your inventory. This should include all your soap making tools, molds, equipment, dry supplies, oils, packaging and even finished products. It is important to know exactly what is in your inventory in the event you have an unexpected order or you need to replace supplies.

Labels

It's not just your finished products that need to be labeled, but your inventory, molds, and equipment should be too. For ingredients you use a lot of and tend to replace often, you could print out a set of labels ahead of time and place them in your folder or loose leaf binder to keep within easy reach and simply take what you need and stick the label to the supplies. This will save time to have the labels ready before you need them so you don't waste time printing them.

Recipes

When you formulate your soap recipes it's a good idea to have a few copies of them. You can save copies on your computer or flash drive but you might not always want to boot your computer up, so having printed copies of your recipes handy is always a good idea. You could organize them by soap type, bath bombs, lotions and even perfume should you make it, keeping the binder in your soap studio or on a close-by shelf.

Packaging

It is a good idea to not only organize your finished product's packaging but to label them too. When you are making multiple products and different sized and shapes of soap, simply placing them on a shelf in their box won't make finding what you need that easy. Instead, label each box your packaging is located in with the size product or soap you will use it for. You could also label where you bought the packaging from with the product's supplier's inventory name or number so you can easily find it again when you need to order more.