Seven steps, about an hour of setup. Work through them in order — each one builds on the last, and by the end you'll have made something, sold it, and know exactly what it cost you.
Enter your company name, your email, and a password. That's it — your company is created instantly and you're taken straight into the app as its administrator.
Your data is walled off from every other company on DepotBooks. Nobody else can see it, and you can't see theirs.
Once you're in, go to Users & Roles in the sidebar to invite the rest of your people. Roles control what each person sees — a warehouse hand doesn't need the income statement, and a sales rep can be limited to their own orders. You can adjust any role later.
Everything you buy, make, or sell is a product — raw materials and finished goods both live in the same catalog. Cement, sand, aggregate, rebar and pigment are products. So are the pavers, caps, and steps you make from them.
For each one you'll set:
| Field | What to put |
|---|---|
| Product Code / SKU | Your own code — CEM-TYPE1, PAV-HOL-6X9. Whatever you already say out loud. |
| Product Name | The plain description: "Holland Paver 6x9 Charcoal" |
| Category | Groups things in reports. Make one for raw materials so they're easy to filter. |
| Default Unit | How you count it — each, pallet, sq ft, ton, bag, yd³. |
| List Price | Your selling price. Leave it at 0 for raw materials you never sell. |
| Physical Stock | Leave at 0 for now. Step 3 explains why. |
This is the step people skip, so it's worth a minute of your attention.
DepotBooks doesn't ask you to type in a "cost" for each product. It works out what your material actually cost you from what you actually paid your suppliers — a running weighted average across every load you've received. That's what makes the numbers later on trustworthy rather than guesswork.
So bring material in by raising a purchase order to your supplier and receiving it: pick the supplier, add the lines with quantities and unit prices, save, then hit Receive when it arrives. Stock goes up and the cost is recorded in the same move.
For opening stock that predates DepotBooks, use Opening Balances in the sidebar — it's built for exactly this, and it starts you off with the right quantities and values on day one.
A recipe is your bill of materials: what goes into one unit of a finished product. One Holland paver might take so many pounds of cement, so much sand and aggregate, a measure of pigment.
Pick the finished product, add a line per raw material with the quantity per unit, and save. The recipe list shows an estimated material cost per unit right away, using the real costs from step 3 — a useful sanity check on your pricing before you've made anything.
Choose the finished product and how many you're making. The materials list fills in from the recipe — edit it if this run is different, which is what you'd do when a mix comes out heavy or you substitute something.
A run moves through three states:
When you complete a run, DepotBooks tells you what those units cost you each. That number came from your real material prices, through your recipe, and it now travels with the product — so when you sell it later, your profit is calculated against what it genuinely cost to make.
Add the customer and the products they want. From there the order flows in the order you'd expect:
| Stage | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sales Order | What they asked for. Stock is spoken for but hasn't moved. |
| Create Invoice | What they owe you. Now it's on the books as a receivable. |
| Mark Shipped | It left the yard. Stock comes down and the cost of those goods is booked against the sale. |
| Record Payment | They paid. The receivable clears. |
New customers can be added as you go, or up front under Customers.
You haven't made a single accounting entry — and you have a full set of books anyway.
Every step you just took wrote itself into a proper double-entry ledger behind the scenes. Receiving material, completing a run, shipping an order, taking a payment: each one posted where it belongs. Open the Income Statement and you'll see the sale, the cost of what you made, and the margin between them. The Balance Sheet shows what you're holding and what you're owed.
You don't have to use this side of DepotBooks to get value from the rest of it. It's simply there, staying correct, for whenever you or your accountant want a look.
Stuck on something, or it doesn't fit how you actually work? Email support@depotbooks.com — during your trial especially, tell us what's awkward. That feedback is the point.