Inventory and classes for quilt shops
QuiltCounter keeps the yardage on your shelves honest while it fills your class calendar, cuts your kits and tells you which best seller is about to run dry. It was built with shop owners at the cutting counter, not in a conference room.
What the shelf actually costs you
Nobody opens a quilt shop because they love reconciling bolt counts on a Sunday night. These four are the ones shop owners raise first when we sit behind their counter for a day.
A customer asks for three yards of the blue you promised her, and the bolt on the shelf has eleven inches left. She drives home to another shop, and she buys her backing there too.
A lost backing sale runs $38 to $70, and she may not come back this season.The Tuesday sampler has ten chairs. The sign up sheet says nine names, one of whom paid in March and cancelled by text. Nobody is sure whether the tenth seat can be sold.
One unsold seat in a $185 six week class is $185 you already paid the teacher for.Twenty kits were promised for the retreat. Someone cut fourteen, someone else cut eight, and the yardage came off a bolt that was also spoken for by the block of the month.
Six duplicate kits at 4.5 yards each is roughly $270 of cotton sitting in a bin.A pattern goes viral in a Facebook group, the coordinating print sells out in nine days, and by the time you call your rep the line has moved on to the next collection.
Owners tell us a missed restock on a hot line costs $900 to $1,600 in a quarter.How the counter stays honest
Send us a spreadsheet, a point of sale export or a photo of your bolt tags. We match SKUs to manufacturer, collection, designer and fiber, then hand you a printable count sheet organized the way your shelves are organized, not alphabetically.
Two people walk the shop scanning bolt tags and typing the yardage on the end. Nothing is installed. The count runs in a browser and saves as you go, so an interrupted Saturday count picks up exactly where it stopped.
Every cut ticket at the counter takes the yardage off the bolt. Fat quarters, half yard bundles and remnant bin moves all come off the same record, so the number on screen matches the number on the cardboard.
When you schedule a class, QuiltCounter reserves the fabric its kit needs and shows the remaining seats on your public sign up page. Reorder alerts fire against your own floor, not a generic threshold.
What is in the software
No modules you will never open. Each of these came out of a request from a shop that was already paying us.
Bolts carry live yardage in eighths of a yard, with a cut history you can scroll back through. Split a bolt, merge two ends or send a remnant to the bin and the math follows it.
Set the chair count for each session and QuiltCounter holds a seat while a student is paying, waitlists the overflow and emails the class when the teacher changes a supply list. Deposits and balances are tracked per student.
Build a kit from a pattern's cutting list and the system holds the yardage on each bolt the moment you approve the run. Print pull sheets and bag labels with the quantities already totaled.
Each bolt gets its own reorder point based on how fast that print actually moves in your shop, not a store wide rule. Alerts arrive as one morning digest with a draft purchase order per vendor.
Enroll members once, then release each month's fabric and pattern on schedule with the card on file charged the same day. Skipped months, gift memberships and mailed shipments all sit in one list.
See sell through by collection, yards cut per staff hour and which teacher fills a room fastest. Every figure opens into the underlying tickets so you can check the story behind it.
It fits the shop you already run
QuiltCounter is the yardage and calendar layer. The tools you already trust keep doing their jobs.
Cut tickets sync with Square, Clover and Lightspeed, so a sale at the drawer moves the yardage on the bolt without anyone typing it twice.
Class income, kit sales and membership charges post to QuickBooks Online as a daily summary journal that your bookkeeper can reconcile in minutes.
Purchase orders export as PDF or CSV, with your account number, ship date and case pack rules already applied per vendor.
The public class sign up page drops into any site as a link or an embed, and confirmations send from your own shop address.
What changes in the first quarter
These come from 62 shops that had been on QuiltCounter for at least ninety days when we surveyed them in June 2026.
Cuts write back to the bolt in real time and drifting bolts land on a weekly recount list, so the wall stops disagreeing with the register.
Roster reconciliation, kit pull sheets and vendor order building stop being three separate hand written jobs done after closing.
A public sign up page that shows real remaining seats, plus a waitlist that converts when someone drops, fills rooms that used to run half empty.
Aging reports surface bolts that have not moved in 240 days early enough to build them into a sale table or a scrappy kit while the collection still sells.
A week on the counter
A quilt shop week has its own rhythm. QuiltCounter was shaped around that rhythm rather than around a generic retail calendar.
One email lists the bolts that fell under their reorder point over the weekend, grouped by vendor with draft purchase orders attached. You approve, edit or ignore each line, and nothing is sent until you say so.
Rosters print with supply lists and any outstanding balances marked. Students who joined the waitlist in the last hour appear on the same sheet, so the teacher is never told a room is full when a chair is open.
Pull sheets come out in shelf order with total yardage per bolt already summed. The fabric is reserved the moment the run is approved, so a Saturday customer cannot accidentally buy the last three yards of the retreat print.
Instead of a full inventory, you get a list of the twelve or so bolts whose recorded yardage has drifted from their cut history. Ten minutes with a tape measure keeps the whole wall trustworthy.
We are not a website builder, we do not process your card payments, and we will not try to sell you a new register. QuiltCounter sits behind the tools you already run and keeps the yardage, the seats and the kits truthful.
If you sell fabric only online in precut bundles, or if you carry fewer than about 200 bolts, the honest answer is that a good spreadsheet will serve you just as well. We say so on the call rather than after you have paid.
Switching without closing the doors
We import three years of sales history where your old system can export it, so sell through and reorder points are useful from the first week rather than after a season of learning.
Typical import: 4,100 line items, done in one afternoon.Most shops run their old count sheet alongside QuiltCounter for two weeks and compare. When the two agree on a Friday, the paper goes in the recycling and not before.
No overlap fee. The parallel period is part of onboarding.Staff learn the cutting counter screen in about twenty minutes because it does three things. Owners get a second session on reports, purchase orders and class finance.
Two live sessions, recorded for anyone who was on the floor.Support is a small team, not a ticket queue in another time zone. During your first month you get a direct line for the days when a bolt count and a register total refuse to agree.
Median first reply in 2025: 41 minutes on weekdays.Shop owners, in their own words
I stopped promising fabric I did not have. Before this, my Saturday cutter would tell a customer we had plenty of a print, and then I would find seven inches on the bolt. Now the number on the screen is the number on the cardboard, and my reorder list writes itself while I make coffee.
Classes were my whole margin and my whole headache. Between deposits, drops and the woman who always pays in cash on the third week, I never knew what a session actually earned. I pulled a report last month and found two teachers I had been underbooking for a year.
We cut 340 retreat kits in February with three people and no arguments about who had already pulled what. The pull sheets came off the printer in shelf order, the yardage was held on the bolts, and nothing got cut twice. That week alone paid for the year.
Plain pricing
Every plan includes unlimited bolts, unlimited staff accounts, the import of your existing inventory and phone support from someone who has worked a cutting counter.
$49 per month
For a single storefront running inventory and retail.
$99 per month
For shops whose calendar earns as hard as the shelves.
$189 per month
For two locations sharing stock, staff and a calendar.
All prices are in US dollars and billed monthly. There is no annual contract, no setup fee and no per seat charge for your staff. Cancel from the billing screen at any time and keep a full export of your bolts, rosters and customer records.
Questions owners ask us first
Three plans, all billed monthly in US dollars: One Shop at $49, Shop and Classes at $99, and Two Shops at $189. There is no setup fee and no charge for onboarding help. Your bolt import, your first class calendar and staff training are included in whichever plan you pick. If your shop grows into a second location, you move up a tier and keep every record you already entered.
Most shops are cutting from QuiltCounter within a week. We import your current bolt list from a spreadsheet or from your existing point of sale export, then you walk the shop once with a phone and confirm the yardage on the shelf. A wall of about 1,400 bolts takes two people roughly six hours to count. After that first count the numbers stay current because every cut writes back to the bolt.
You own your data and we never sell it or share it with fabric manufacturers. Each staff account gets a role, so a Saturday cutter can ring a sale and log yardage without seeing margin, payroll or the customer list. Records live in encrypted US hosting with nightly backups you can restore yourself. If you leave, you export everything as CSV and we delete your account within thirty days.
QuiltCounter runs alongside Square, Clover and Lightspeed, and cut tickets flow back into the bolt record so the shelf count matches the drawer. Class payments and kit sales export to QuickBooks Online as a daily journal summary. Vendor reorders can be generated as a purchase order PDF or as a CSV in the layout your rep expects. If your rep wants a format we have not seen, send it over and we will map it.
Every plan is month to month and you cancel from the billing screen without calling anyone. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period, so a class that is already sold stays on the calendar until it runs. Before your last day you can export bolts, rosters, kits, customers and purchase history in full. Nothing is held hostage and there is no cancellation charge.
It does not, because QuiltCounter treats a bolt as an estimate with a confidence range rather than a perfect figure. Manufacturers put 15 yards on a bolt that measures 14.6, and the end of a bolt gets fat quarters cut off it at the register. The system flags any bolt whose recorded yardage drifts more than half a yard from its cut history and puts it on a short recount list. Shops that work that list weekly report shelf accuracy above 96 percent.
Bolt and Counter
Reporting on the working economics, inventory craft and classroom side of running an independent quilt shop in the US.
Book a walkthrough
Tell us how many bolts you carry and what you teach, and we will walk your own numbers on a screen share, usually within two business days. Thirty minutes, no slide deck, and you can bring the staff member who does the counting.
If you would rather see the software running against your real inventory before you decide, send us an export and we will load a sandbox for you at no charge.
We answer every message ourselves, usually within two business days, and we never add you to a mailing list. If email suits you better than a form, send your bolt count questions straight to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.
