What each fair paid you per hour
A busy stall can still lose money once the pitch fee, the travel and the card fees come out. I built one workbook for makers who sell at craft fairs and markets, and it works out what each event paid you per hour, then ranks every fair you have done so you can see which ones deserve another booking.
The question
this build answers
How do I work out which craft fairs and markets are worth booking again once the pitch fee, travel and card fees come out?
From the first trigger
to the finished job.
The working version, step by step.
List the season's events
Each fair gets a line on my Events tab with its date, town and application deadline, the pitch or table fee, travel, parking, your share of insurance and the hours you will spend on the stall. The flag reads apply now when a deadline is close and deadline passed once you have missed one.
Decide what to bring
Your stall price list goes on Products with what each item costs you to make or buy. On Stock to bring I set out how many of each product go to each event, valued at your prices and at cost, with a column for what came home after the fair.
Pack and count the float
My Packing checklist holds 32 things, from the table cover to the gazebo weights, and you tick each one as it goes in the car and again at pack-down. The Float tab counts your cash tin by note and coin, then checks it against the cash sales you logged.
Log the sales, cash or card
The Sales log takes what sold at each event, product by product, and whether each sale was cash or card. I left the card reader's rate as one blue cell at the top of Results: type your provider's rate there and it comes off every card sale.
Read each event's results
For every event, Results works out the money: revenue, cost of goods sold, fees and costs, profit and profit per hour, then items sold, sell-through and the best seller by units. Before you go, my Results tab also gives you the takings you need to cover that event's costs.
Keep the fairs that pay
Compare ranks every finished event by profit per hour and marks it keep going or drop against a minimum you set. In my sample season the minimum was 12 an hour, and the two finished fairs came out one on each side of it.
The fair planner, instant download
Craft fair and market planner: profit per hour for each event, stock to bring, a sales log, a float check and a packing checklist
You get one Excel workbook that also imports into Google Sheets, plus a README and a sources file, with nothing to install. If a total or a flag looks wrong, message me from your order and I will check it.
Open the fair planner on EtsyChecked by recalculating it
Before listing it, I recalculated all 8,825 formulas across the ten tabs with a formula engine outside Excel, then typed a sample season into a copy with three fairs and four products.
The good fair came out at 31.06 an hour and keep going, the weak one at 5.07 and drop, and the float showed the 2.00 I left short on purpose. All 128 checks matched the values I worked out by hand, every deadline flag included, with no error cells.
Where the figures come from
I took the float rows from the four notes the Bank of England lists as current and the eight coins the Royal Mint lists in circulation, and you can type your own currency over them.
Sell-through follows Lightspeed's definition, units sold over the units you took. The card rate cell starts at 0, and for my own checks I used SumUp's UK pay-as-you-go rate of 1.69%, which I read on 18 September 2026.
What it leaves out
Pitch fees, insurance premiums, licences and trading rules change from one organiser and council to the next, so I state none of them as fact and leave each one as a blue cell for you.
Online sales and tax are in my Etsy bookkeeping and inventory bundle, and dispatching the orders you take online is in my Etsy order and inventory tracker.
Before you spend anything
The fit matters.
Who should not buy this
If your shop only sells online, I would skip this one, because the whole file plans a day behind a stall, from the pitch fee to the float.
If you came looking for printed price tags or signs for your stall, I did not put any in this file.
Yours to keep
What lands
on your desk.
- A ten-tab Excel workbook that opens in Numbers and LibreOffice and imports into Google Sheets
- Events with deadline flags, stock to bring, a sales log and results with profit per hour for each fair
- A ranking of every finished event, a cash float check and a 32-item packing checklist
- A README and a sources file naming every figure and definition and when I read it
See the work
Open the proof.
Published case studies of running systems. Each links to the thing itself.
A few useful
answers.
Does it work outside the UK?
I start the float rows as UK notes and coins and you can type your own currency over them, while every fee and cost is a blue cell you fill in yourself.
Which card reader does it assume?
It assumes none, because the rate cell starts at 0 and you type your own provider's rate, which Results then takes off every card sale.
Does it work in Google Sheets?
Import it through File, Import, Upload. Every formula in it uses a function Google Sheets supports, and I checked the results on a filled sample copy before I listed it.
What are the takings to cover costs?
It is what you need to sell at an event to pay the pitch fee and other costs once the stock cost and card fees come off, and I count every sale as a card sale so the figure errs on the high side.
A little further down
the same path.
Related builds for the rest of your business.
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Logging receipts and business miles for an Etsy shop's tax year
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Keeping an Etsy shop's books and stock in one spreadsheet
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Tracking Etsy orders, dispatch dates and stock in one sheet
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Printing a gift certificate, price list, tags and a care card that match
Read the build ↗Make this work for you
Your tools.
Your working version.
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