Do any of the many tools that exist for EVE track production? Plenty of things track station trading, but does anything track the price I built an item for so I can make sure I time my sales right?
Or is this just more spreadsheet work?
Itâs very hard to make any kind of tool to keep track of your production costs, as the price can differ quite abit depending on where you do it and what the circumstances are at that given time.
Your best bet is to make spreadsheets to do it for you. Import various material prices, calculate your production cost then compare it to market prices.
This is how I do just about all of my Industry, I mean with spreadsheets, and they serve me quite well and is semi-automated.
One problem with tracking profitability in Eve is that the material you have in inventory wasnât purchased at the current price and the product youâre building wonât be sold at the current price. In both cases, youâre dealing with moving averages. Tool like https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprint/ will give you a snapshot at current Jita pricing but youâll need a proper material management package if you want more than a rough idea. This is particularly true if you participate in several links of the value chain. i.e. build your own components or harvest your own raw material.
The estimated prices provided by CCP in the industry tool are a moving average across all of New Eden. I use this and the price history chart in the market tool to determine whether or not to build something and the status of my wallet to assess profitability. As long as it keeps going up, I figure Iâm doing something right!
The reason there is no tool is because there are far too many variables to track. Buy price of materials, cost index, facility bonuses/taxes (we still cannot query the bonuses/taxes of structures out of game), skills, etc.
The best youâll be able to do is a rough estimate, and too many guesses. Developers like me donât want to code it because it will inevitably end up being people PMing you saying âyour tool didnât calculate this correctlyâ.
Historical price recording would require a bigger spreadsheet! That has deterred me so far, like most people I would suppose I stick to current prices hoping that market ups and downs will cancel out with the help of some âthat looks cheap, Iâll have someâ purchases of raw materials.
[returns to base with a cargo of stuff like that, bought in another Region where prices are lower]
Too many variables for tracking the profitability of single items that you produce or multiple items yes.
However, if you want to track your overall profitability, itâs actually quite easy and there are a few different ways. This is accounting, not industry.
Using a corporate account is the best way as you can set divisions but a character account would work too. You basically just need to keep track of your outgoings and income. what you spend on materials versus what you make from selling the product. As long as you are sure to keep all âpersonalâ purchases ie. shineys for your collection or a nice pvp ship to go and get exploded. Things like manufacturing implants and mining ships would have to be taken into account as an âindustry expenseâ and would be accounted for in your expenditures. By combining some of the trading tools and a decent business accounting spreadsheet, along with some vigilance of transferring your accounting data you can build a pretty good picture over time of your profitability, changing things and looking back at your data will show you if its making you more isk or losing you isk. Remember, this is accounting, not industry.
I hope this helped.
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Certified Dank post, my friend. Unfortunately, Iâm in a corp myself, so I canât use this method, but I could make a spreadsheet and just be diligent about expendituresâŚ
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yeah Like i said it works just as easily with a personal account, also rather than every time you have an industry expense not it down, go through like once a day or every few days and do it in one hit make it easier imo, but you might like to ledger it all down as you go 
happy spreadhseeting
What I do is:
- I compute for every BPO I have and bpc I can invent the total cost of the required input items to produce one item, as well as the total item value and the time to produce an item(manufacture for bpo, invention+copy+manufacture for bpc)
- if the value (out-in)/time is good enough, as well as the margin and the time is high enoug, I provision the required materials and schedule the jobs
- provisioning materials mean I keep a track of the maximum value I ever needed. eg if I need to provision 100 items that require 10 mexallon each, I will provision 1000 mexallon unless I already had provisioned more.
- schedule means I simply keep the requirement of invent/manufacture in memory, and I have the list showed sorted by time, so I can launch them from the game (and thus remove the jobs from the list).
- basically when I start a job, letâs say an invention job, the materials that are used are removed form the inventory, (eg 10 mexa), thus my shoplist will be added 10 mexa a bit later. A part of that is required to be in assets, while remaining value can be in assets or in BO.
http://www.eve-cost.eu/warehouse
Will work, but with eve-central down and quite likely permanently dead, and the siteâs owner unfortunately abandoning the tool, eve-cost wont automatically fetch prices. However, once things are added in the warehouse, I believe you can set it to where if something shows up on your market transactions, it can add or subtract from the warehouse. The prices it will show in the warehouse, however, are averages. You wont be able to get 100% accurate numbers without using a custom tool. This functionality will die may 8th
The manufacturing tab also allows you to set custom price based on what the warehouse values are as well.
My way is to focus on a few dozen of products I know the price very well, producing not more than 5 at a time, and if unsure there is always https://eve-industry.org/calc/ or the ingame simulation.
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