Resources
Practical guidance for makers and small product businesses—from understanding what your products really cost to building better inventory, production, and pricing habits.
Start here
You don't need an accounting degree or an operations team to understand your business. Start with the fundamentals and build from there.
Learn how materials, components, products, bills of materials, production, inventory, and orders fit together in a product business.
Understand what it actually costs to make something and how those costs should inform what you charge.
Build practical habits for tracking inventory, recording production, and understanding finished-goods availability.
As your business grows, learn how to use the information you're already collecting to understand performance and make better decisions.
The fundamentals
Cajella is built around some simple ideas. Understanding them makes it easier to understand both your software and your business.
Product cost is more than the most obvious material. Materials, components, labor, equipment, and other configured costs can all contribute to what it takes to make something.
Adding a percentage to cost and earning that percentage as margin are not the same thing. Understanding the difference helps you make more intentional pricing decisions.
Sales tell you how much money came in. Connecting those sales to cost of goods sold helps show how much value was actually left behind.
A practical vocabulary
Raw materials used to make your products—such as filament, wood, acrylic, fabric, resin, or other consumable inputs.
Purchased parts or items used as part of a finished product, such as hardware, magnets, electronics, fasteners, or other discrete pieces.
A BOM defines what a product requires—the materials, components, and other items that go into making it.
The cost associated with the products you've actually sold, allowing revenue to be compared with the cost behind those sales.
The difference between revenue and cost of goods sold before other business expenses are considered.
Margin helps show how much of each sales dollar remains after the cost associated with the product.
Built into the product
Cajella is designed to make these concepts useful in the day-to-day operation of your business—not just something you read about and then recreate in another spreadsheet.
Start free and build a clearer picture of your product business, from materials to margins.
