Google Sheet alternative to Craftybase or Soapmaker Pro

[Grantxw8]

I should have said I do have the office suite, including Excel, on my MacBook. Sheets is handy for me because being cloud-based I can check it from my phone, iPad or MacBook. But - I am going to look again at your spreadsheet.

Hi @Vicki C,
We are an Apple centric house - although I was a Windows user at work. The office had IT staff available for when things, inevitably, went wrong. Having to do my own support at home led me to using Macs and other Apple products. Mostly, it just works.

Microsoft’s Office products for Apple are pretty good by my estimation. Especially since they added VBA back to the Excel product a number of years ago - making macros possible again. Being essentially lazy and hating needless repetition I like the automation it allows.

I use a variety of devices in day to day life including a Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iPhone, iPad and they all run Excel in one form or another. I should note that only the full fledged computers (not the iOS devices) are capable of making use of all the features of the soap designing spreadsheet tool. Only those devices can run macros as only Excel for MacOS has VBA. However, I can access all of the non-macro functions so it’s 100% useable for looking at and assessing different soap recipes, their characteristics, costs, etc. The macros are mainly for showing/hiding different sets of sheets.

I plan to do an instruction document to cover most of the features of the tool. There are quite a few features so it might take a while to make it comprehensive. I’ll probably make a start and publish it incrementally.

Anyway, enough rambling. If you find time to try the tool, please let me know how it goes. There seems to be a variety of experiences which I’m guessing are due to individual PC istallations (especially security settings).

All the best.

 

[Becky1024]

I've given it some thought and decided I will not try to make Google Sheets into something it's not...Google Sheets might be easier to share a link, but it's not for building apps. Even though @Grantxw8 works with Microsoft Excel (another spreadsheet platform), Excel is superior to Google because it supports more "app-like" capabilities (like macros, etc.).

I fully support him in his endeavor and will help out where I can.

I will, however, continue with a "one sheet" feasibility calculator that will help soapers quickly determine the particulars of a given recipe. It will not be tied to inventory, automatic ordering systems, or "talk" to other spreadsheets. This was useful for me to determine profit potential and true cost analysis. It's where this all started and I hope it's useful to others.

It will:

1. Allow you to tweak your formula in grams or ounces
2. Recalculate on batch size changes
3. Calculate the lye/water amounts for KOH and/or NaOH, with superfatting, discounts and/or lye purity variables
4. Calculate your total material cost (you supply the prices you paid for your bulk materials & shipping)
5. Determine the total volume each bar will take up in your mould + considers curing shrinkage by starting weight & final sellable weight
6. Calculate the labor cost (uses a per/hour variable, even if it's you doing the work... Time is money)
7. Calculate the packaging costs (you provide)

It will not:

• Provide any kind of inventory insight (stock levels, etc.)
• Produce a shopping list when supplies run low (part of inventory)
• Integrate with Wix, Shopify, or any other e-commerce system
• Have any kind of visibility into fixed or variable costs (rent, utilities, insurance, taxes, etc.)

Example scenario:

• Let's assume I am formulating a new soap and trying to understand cost and profit potential
• I know I'm willing to swap some of the ingredients out if needed, but not others... I just need to see the particulars before I bend on substitutions
• I mostly buy my materials from Amazon, Costco, WSP, etc. But what if I purchase 44 lb. bags of coconut oil from Jedwards or Shay and Company? i.e. how much does that lower my cost per bar?
• Maybe I really don't NEED colloidal oatmeal, or sorbitol, or aloe vera juice, or... If I leave these out, will it affect my product?
• What if I use labels instead of custom-printed boxes, so the plain boxes are interchangeable, and can be used for all my bars?
• What if I swap CO for PKO because it's 20% cheaper in bulk? Am I willing to consider this?
• What if I plug in a rate of $15/hour for labor to see how hiring my niece might affect the margin?
• What if I could reduce prep time by 10 minutes by master batching?
• Etc, etc.

This is what I put together. I hope it makes sense...

Because I've opted to not build something bigger or more integrated, I probably only need a week or so to polish up the spreadsheet before posting an update. I'd also like to make a "how to" video if time permits.

@Grantxw8, if any of this "prototyping" logic makes sense for your application, by all means, feel free to incorporate it into your app.

Thanks all!

Awesome! Looking forward to it!!