Free tool
How many hours a month does your class schedule really take?
Count the kit cutting and the classroom resets alongside the teaching hours and the class calendar starts to look like the job it is.
Free tool, no sign up
What does a yard of cut fabric actually earn you?
Put in your landed cost, your bolt length and the yardage you lose per bolt, and see the margin that survives to the register.
The price sticker on a bolt is not the margin. Between the invoice and the register you pay freight, you lose a little at every cut, you give away a sample for the classroom wall, and you end up with a piece too short to sell at full price. Every one of those is yardage you paid for and did not sell at the shelf price, which means the true cost of a saleable yard is higher than the wholesale line on the invoice.
This calculator spreads the full landed cost of a bolt over the yards you can actually sell from it. Run it once with an everyday basic and once with a designer collection you buy in smaller quantities, and the difference in real margin usually explains why two bolts that look equally profitable on paper behave differently across a season.
Your result
True cost per saleable yard
$7.24
The whole bolt cost spread across only the yards you can sell.
Gross margin per yard
$6.74
What one yard contributes before rent, wages and the classroom.
Gross margin, percent of shelf price
48.2
Compare this against the markup you thought you were taking.
Monthly gross profit from cut yardage
$4,368
What the fabric wall contributes in a normal month at this pace.
Change the yards lost per bolt by half a yard and watch the monthly number move, which is the whole argument for measuring shelf ends.
Why the loss per bolt matters more than owners expect
Half a yard lost on a fifteen yard bolt sounds like nothing. Spread across the bolts a busy shop sells through in a month it is a meaningful sum, and it comes straight off the bottom line because you already paid for it and already paid the freight on it. Loss per bolt is the input most owners guess at, and it is the one most worth measuring for a month.
Measure it the plain way. For twenty bolts, write the starting yardage on the bolt end, and when the bolt is finished compare total recorded cuts against that starting number. The gap is your real loss per bolt. Most shops find a number between a third of a yard and a full yard, and shops that cut generously to be kind to customers find more.
Using the number when you buy
Real margin per yard belongs in the buying decision, not just the year end review. A collection that arrives in short put ups with high freight can carry a lower true margin than a basic you reorder by the case, even at the same shelf price. Run both through this calculator before your next appointment and you will price the designer goods with your eyes open.
It also settles the markdown question. When you know what a yard really cost you, you know exactly how far a shelf end can fall before it stops being worth the space it occupies. Owners who work from the true cost per saleable yard mark down earlier and lose less, because they stop defending a number that was never the real cost.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include the yards I cut for class samples?
Yes, put them in the yards lost per bolt field. Sample yardage is fabric you bought and will not sell at shelf price, so it belongs in the cost of the yards that remain. If you make a lot of samples from one collection, run that collection separately.
What about fabric I sell at club or guild discount?
Use your regular shelf price here and treat the discount as a separate decision. Mixing the discount into the shelf price hides how much the club is actually costing you per yard. Once you know the true cost per saleable yard, you can judge whether the discount still makes sense.
Does this handle precuts and fat quarters?
Not directly, because those are sold as pieces rather than by the yard. If you cut fat quarters yourself from a bolt, count that yardage as sold rather than lost, and price the resulting pieces from the true cost per yard this calculator gives you.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The bolt count reset checklist for an independent quilt shop
A shelf by shelf routine for getting your recorded yardage and your actual yardage to agree, and for keeping them that way.
That number rests on your bolt record
Whatever this calculator just told you is only as sound as the yardage you believe is on the shelf. QuiltCounter posts the cut at the table so the balance stays right between physical counts, and the reorder alert speaks in bolts and yards rather than abstract stock levels. Book a demo, put the same inputs in against live bolt records, and see the arithmetic run on measured yardage instead of your best estimate.