For Etsy & handmade sellers
Is your Etsy shop actually making money?
You know your revenue. You probably know your material costs, roughly. What almost nobody tracks is the third number: the hours actually spent sourcing, making, photographing, listing, packing, and shipping. Without that number, "profitable" is a guess — and for a lot of shops, it's a guess that's paying the owner well under minimum wage.
The gap general budgeting apps don't close
Mint-style trackers and YNAB-style budgeting tools are built to answer "where did the money go." That's a real and useful question for a household budget. It is not the question a shop owner needs answered, because it stops at dollars — it has no concept of the hours you traded to earn them. Two shops with identical revenue and identical material costs can have wildly different real profitability if one owner spends 3 hours per order and the other spends 30 minutes. A budgeting app shows them as the same business. They aren't.
| Question | Mint / YNAB-style budgeting apps | Groundkeep |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue minus material cost | Yes, if you categorize transactions consistently. | Yes — log each sale and each material purchase as a finance entry. |
| Hours actually worked per order | Not tracked at all — there's no concept of time. | Yes — a focus/pomodoro timer you run while you work, tagged by task. |
| Real margin per hour worked | Can't be computed — the app only has one of the two numbers it needs. | Yes — compare logged margin against logged hours for the same stretch of work. |
| Where the data lives | Usually a cloud account tied to a subscription. | A local SQLite file on your own machine, one-time $59. |
How the 10-minute check actually works
This isn't a new feature bolted on for Etsy sellers — it's two things Groundkeep already does, used together on purpose. Neither one alone answers the question; side by side, they do.
01
Log material costs Every time you buy yarn, blanks, packaging, or postage, add it as a finance entry. Takes seconds, and it's the same log you'd want for tax time anyway.02
Log each sale Same finance log, the income side. Now you have real revenue and real cost of goods for a given week or month, not an estimate.03
Run the focus timer while you work Start it for a listing-photography session, a batch of making, or a packing-and-shipping run. It logs actual worked minutes against that task, not a guess made afterward.04
Divide margin by hours Subtract cost from revenue for the period, then divide by the hours the timer actually recorded. That number is your real hourly wage from the shop — not revenue per hour, margin per hour.What this changes once you can see it
A real number, not a feeling
"Business feels busy" and "business pays a livable rate" are different claims. Ten minutes of logging turns the second one from a guess into arithmetic you can check every week.
Spot the time-sink product
Tag focus sessions by product line and you'll often find one item with good margin on paper and terrible margin per hour, because it eats far more time than the others.
One weekly review, not five tools
The same dashboard that holds your finance entries and focus sessions also runs a weekly review, so the margin-per-hour check can be one more line in a habit you already have, not a separate spreadsheet.
It's your data, not a subscription
Shop financials sitting in someone else's cloud budgeting app is one more thing to worry about. Groundkeep keeps it in a local SQLite file you own, for a one-time $59.