Candle Business Inventory Spreadsheet (Free Template)

A candle business inventory spreadsheet needs to track three things: supplies (wax, fragrance oil, wicks, jars, lids, labels), what one candle of each scent and size uses, and the finished candles you have to sell. The trick is to log each pour as one row, and let the sheet take every supply off by recipe and add the candles on. Below is that sheet with a real week filled in, the cost of each candle, and the free Excel file.

The short version

• List supplies in the unit you buy and count them in: wax by the pound, fragrance by the ounce, jars each.
• Write a recipe for each candle: how much wax, how much fragrance, which wick, which vessel, which label.
• Log every pour as one row. That row is what takes supplies off and puts candles on.
• Check the LOW column before you order, and before a market.
• When the sheet gets heavy, TaroStack does the same job from the pour itself. There's a section on that below.

The five tabs

The example is a one-person candle business, made up for this article, in the week of September 21, 2026: 48 Plumeria jars, 36 Coconut Lime jars and 60 Plumeria tins.

Recipes: what one candle uses

A 9 oz jar candle here is 8.33 oz of soy wax and 0.67 oz of fragrance, which is a fragrance load of 8% of the wax's weight. Your wax maker and fragrance supplier say how much their products can take, so use their numbers, not mine.

The 4 oz tin works the same way: 3.70 oz of wax, 0.30 oz of fragrance, a smaller wick, a tin and its label, for $2.05. Wax is bought by the 50 lb case at $2.20 a pound, but poured by the ounce, so the Supplies tab has a column that says there are 16 ounces in a pound, and the sheet does the conversion.

Two things stand out. The fragrance costs as much as the wax, even though there's twelve times less of it. And the jar is the single most expensive thing in the candle. Neither shows up if you only cost the wax.

Pours: the row that moves everything

On Thursday, September 24, you pour 24 more Plumeria jars and type one row: Sep 24, Plumeria jar 9 oz, 24, batch P0924. That row takes 200 oz of wax, 16 oz of Plumeria fragrance, 24 wicks, 24 jars and 24 labels off the Supplies tab, and adds 24 candles to the Candles tab. Nobody touches either tab.

Here's where supplies ended the week:

This is the useful part. There's plenty of wax, which is the thing you'd think to check. But 13.84 oz of Plumeria is enough for 20 more jars, and if Saturday's market wants three dozen, you're short of fragrance, not wax. The jars are low too, after two cracked in a heat gun test (they're on the Supplies tab as "other out").

The finished candles: 27 Plumeria jars, 18 Coconut Lime jars and 38 Plumeria tins on hand, worth $257 at cost.

Get the spreadsheet

Download the candle inventory spreadsheet. It's this week, filled in, with the formulas live: change the price of wax and every candle's cost moves. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

The two formulas that do the work are on the Recipes tab:

Candles poured      =SUMIF(Pours!$B:$B, A2, Pours!$C:$C)
Used so far         =C2*F2/INDEX(Supplies!$D:$D, MATCH(B2, Supplies!$A:$A, 0))

The first counts how many of that candle you've poured. The second multiplies by the amount per candle and converts to the supply's own unit, so 8.33 oz times 48 jars becomes 24.99 lb of wax. The Supplies tab adds up every recipe row that uses each supply. It's the same design as the inventory template with recipes, which does it for food.

Using it each week

1. Log every pour the day you pour it, with a batch code. Ten seconds, and everything else depends on it.
2. Log deliveries of supplies when they arrive, with the supplier's lot number for fragrance and wax.
3. Once a week, put what you sold into the Candles tab from your shop or market sheet.
4. Anything that breaks, a test candle, a sample: "Other out" on the Supplies tab.
5. Once a month, count your supplies and candles and compare with "On hand".

Turning the $3.99 into a price, with your time added, is its own job, in how to price homemade candles.

Where this stops working

It works for a few scents and one person pouring. It gets fragile as it grows. Add a scent and you add five recipe rows, typed exactly right, or the formulas quietly miss them. Change a wick size and every candle that used the old one needs editing, and last month's pours get recalculated with this month's recipe. Sell online and at markets, and the Candles tab needs sales from two places typed in by hand, so it's always a few days behind the shelf.

And it can't tell you which fragrance lot went into which pour. If a customer says a candle smells wrong, or a supplier writes about a bad lot, you're looking through a notebook, if there is one.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack runs the same idea without the typing. A pour is a batch: record it, and each supply comes off by recipe from the lots you actually used, and the candles go on. Units convert on their own, so buy wax by the 50 lb case, pour it by the ounce, and TaroStack does the math. Each candle's cost comes from what you actually paid for that wax and that bottle of fragrance, so when the price of Plumeria goes up, the cost of a Plumeria jar follows without anyone editing a cell.

The questions this spreadsheet can't answer are the ones that cost you a market. The reorder list tells you how many days of cover you have at the rate you're really pouring, so the fragrance that runs out on Friday shows up on Monday, and TaroStack alerts you when anything reaches its reorder point. Every pour records which fragrance lot went into it, so a question about one bottle takes one report. If you sell on Shopify, TaroStack connects to your store, and we set it up with you, so what sold online is counted without you typing it in.

Recipes and pours are on Standard at $99 a month, and the first 30 days are free. Your supplies, recipes and opening counts import from a spreadsheet like this one, with a preview of every row before anything is saved. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How do I keep track of candle inventory?

Keep supplies and finished candles on separate tabs, write a recipe for each candle, and log every pour as a row. The pour takes supplies off by recipe and adds candles; sales take candles off. Count once a month to catch breakage and mistakes.

What should be on a candle inventory list?

Every supply in the unit you count it in (wax in pounds, fragrance in ounces, wicks, vessels, lids and labels each), its cost, how many you have and when to reorder. Then each finished candle by scent and size, with how many you have.

How much does it cost to make a candle?

In this example, $3.99 for a 9 oz jar candle and $2.05 for a 4 oz tin, before your time. The jar and the fragrance are the biggest costs, not the wax. Your number depends on your supplies and fragrance load, so cost it from your own invoices.

Is there candle inventory software?

Yes. General maker inventory tools, TaroStack among them, handle recipes, pours and supplies, and some connect to Shopify. A spreadsheet like this one is a fine place to start.