Candle Business Manager

You poured thirty candles this weekend — but what does one candle actually cost you? Wax, fragrance, the jar, the lid, the label — and after the testers and the two that never cured right, what did the batch really cost per candle you can sell? This spreadsheet runs the whole business. The Product Cost Calculator adds every ingredient and component line by line into a true unit cost, then figures wholesale and retail prices from that cost at your target margins — and shows the real margin on the price you actually charge, flagged AT TARGET or BELOW TARGET. The Batch Log turns each pour into a cost per sellable candle, so tester and cure losses land where they belong. Materials flag themselves OK, ORDER SOON or OUT before you run short mid-pour, and finished stock counts itself from your batches and your sales.

The sample data is one fictional month: Ember & Oak Candle Co., October 2026 — 3 candle products, 4 batches and 12 orders across retail, wholesale and market. The studio sells 136 candles for $1,608 and keeps $463.61. The Autumn Ember costs $5.55 a candle and prices itself to $9.25 wholesale and $13.88 retail; batch 1 works out to $5.95 per sellable candle; and one candle, priced by eye at $18.00, sits below its target margin the whole month, flagged in red. The manager starts at a 60% retail target and a 40% wholesale target — change either in one cell and every price, margin and flag follows.

Transparency note: this spreadsheet was designed with AI assistance, then hand-built and formula-tested by our shop.

What you receive is the finished spreadsheet file, delivered instantly at checkout as a PDF containing your Google Sheets copy link. Open it, choose "Make a copy," and the file is yours. It runs in Google Sheets on a free Google account — nothing to install — and the sample data is included so you can see the formulas work. If a file ever breaks, you receive a corrected copy of the file free. This is a digital product — no physical item will be shipped.