SoapMaker best practices

[kbuska]

I'm having the following learning challenges and I'm hoping others have worked around them and could give me some insight.

1. Your Lip Balm recipe has a percentage of waste that is left on the lip balm tray so you make more product then 50 * .15. You adjust the portions of your recipe to 50 but the per oz size adjusts to .20 and it follows this to when you invoice a client. So when you invoice a client, the lip balm size reads .20 not .15... I hope you were able to follow that.

2. You put your test batches and play around soap stuff in so it properly tracks how much supplies you have left but you don't want them listed as products to sell.

3. You resize a batch to fit a certain mold you want to use but I end up having a Raspberry Vanilla 2, 3, 4, or Lg Mold, or WSP Mold. All the recipes of the same bar yet different weights are annoying. I have 3 different size molds (8 inch, 14 inch, and 24 inch loafs)

4. How do you deal with Embeds? ie. using 1 recipe to make balls that you will use in another recipe yet you want to know the combined cost. The program really needs be able to include produced products in the recipes so you can make embedded soaps, and/or gift baskets, etc.

If these have been talked about before, please forgive me.

Thank you,
Ken

 

[Apothefairy]

Hi Ken!

I think I would probably wither away if I hadn't found SoapMaker. I was using home-made databases in Access and they worked, but it seemed like every day I was having to fix or change something I left out that didn't work for me.

1. Not entirely sure I follow you on this one, but you should be able to manually adjust shrinkage percentages in the batch editing area. Same with being able to adjust portion number and portion size.

2. I name my test batch recipes "Test <something>". The something is to distinguish it from other batches, ie. Test Olive, Test Cranapple. Then store them in the "Archive" Group. When you pull up your My Products, you can elect to show "All (except Archive)" which is awesome for an at-a-glance for what product you have made without showing test and oops batches. Alternately you could just create a Test group in Recipes. Filtering in the Products window wouldn't quite be the same though.

3. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way around this. This was one of the largest stumbling blocks when I was importing my data from my data bases into SoapMaker. (They even detail a similar situation in the Support KnowledgeBase. Their solution is exactly that, resize the batch and name it differently for each size.)

4. This may be a ridiculous solution to some, but it was the first one I was able to think of and works rather well for me. MySupplies > Blends tab. Make a new blend formula almost exactly like you would a recipe. It will cost the batch for you and give you a total batch weight. All that jazz. Then when making your recipe using embeds, you actually add those embeds as you would a normal ingredient. You just need to remember when formulating your recipe to weigh out the embeds you're using so you have a benchmark weight to put in your recipe for future use.

If I misunderstood anything feel free to redirect!