Artisan View is an iPhone, iPad, and Mac app that organizes formulas, batch production, inventory, and cost for artisan soap and cosmetics. It came out of the same problem that produced Receitório, with the same sister on the other side of the table.
Receitório solved the food half of her work. Recipes, cost sheets, ingredients, sales, all inside the app. What stayed outside was the other half of what she produces, the part that comes off a bench instead of a stove: soap, candles, cosmetic formulas. That half stayed exactly where it had always been, in a notebook.
Notebooks are excellent. They do not freeze, they never ask to update, they do not lose your session, and they work through a blackout. The problem with a notebook is not the notebook. It is the arithmetic it refuses to do.
A soap formula is a recipe with unforgiving units. Not “a cup” and not “to taste”. Grams and milliliters, and the gap between right and nearly right shows up weeks later, when the bar has already cured and there is nothing to be done about it. So you write the formula on the page, run the batch, cross out what you used, and write it again on the next page at double the yield. Then somebody asks what that bar of soap costs. And the notebook says nothing.
Not for lack of data. It says nothing because the data is scattered. The price of the oil is on an invoice that stayed in the shopping bag. How much lye is left is in the head of whoever opened the packet. The batch yield is three pages back, with a correction in the margin. Answering the question means reopening the whole notebook, the calculator, and a certain amount of faith. Nobody does that every week. So the price becomes a guess, and the guess becomes a polite loss.
Artisan View was built around that one question. A formula holds exact measurements in grams and milliliters, with the batch yield. Running a batch deducts stock automatically, because that is precisely what just happened on the bench. Invoice scanning, NF-e or DANFE, tops the supplies back up at the price you actually paid, not the price you were paying last year. With what came in and what went out in the same place, cost and margin are there in real time, without anyone having to ask.
Sales go in by channel, because a market stall, a custom order, and a shop do not cost the same or return the same. Everything syncs over iCloud and works offline, which matters more than it sounds: a workbench rarely has good signal, and both hands are usually busy.
What I did not want to build was another generic inventory system with a recipe screen bolted onto the side. Those exist, and they do not understand that a formula has yield, has variation, has leftovers, and that all of it needs to talk to what is on the shelf and what sold on Saturday. They treat a bar of soap like a screw. Screws do not cure for six weeks.
I also did not want to trade a notebook for a thirty-field form. If logging a batch is more work than running the batch, the app loses to the notebook, and it deserves to. So production is the short path through the app, and everything else settles out from there.
The app is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and the details are at artisanview.app. If you make soap, candles, or cosmetics by hand and still answer “let me check” when someone asks your price, it is worth a look.
And if your problem is the same one but with food, that is the other story: Receitório does this job for pastry and food production, and it came first.