Etsy Earnings Tab vs Spreadsheet vs Profit Tracker: Which Do You Need?

Last verified: November 6, 2026

Etsy's Earnings tab is enough to check what one order paid out. A spreadsheet is enough if you sell a handful of orders a month and don't mind typing. A profit tracker starts to earn its place when you want profit by product across months, with your own costs included, without retyping every order. The reason is simple: Etsy's own numbers stop at Etsy's fees, and your materials, packaging and time are not in them.

This guide compares the three options using what Etsy's help pages say (checked November 6, 2026) and what CraftKept does today. CraftKept is our product, so we also say where it does not help.

What Etsy's Earnings tab shows

On Etsy.com, open Shop Manager, then Orders, choose an order from the New or Completed tab and select Earnings. The breakdown shows how much the buyer paid, postage costs, marketing costs, fees, credits and refunds, where they apply. It updates if you later change the order, for example by adding a postage label or processing a return.

Two limits matter:

Only postage labels bought through Etsy are included. Labels bought elsewhere are not.
Etsy’s page does not say how the Offsite Ads fee, the Regulatory Operating Fee or VAT on fees are labeled in this view. It only refers to "marketing costs" and "fees", so check an order of your own to see how they appear.

For one order this is the quickest check there is, it is free, and it needs no upload.

What Etsy's payment account shows

The payment account has an Activity Summary for a time range you choose, with totals for sales, shipping label purchases, refunds, sales tax paid by buyers, fees and credits, grouped into Net profit, Sales and fees, Marketing and Shipping.

The Net profit figure there is defined by Etsy as the funds from your sales minus refunds, fees, shipping costs and taxes. Etsy's page does not mention the cost of goods, so it does not account for what you pay to make or buy your items. That is not a flaw in Etsy's report, because Etsy does not know your costs. But it means “Net profit” in Shop Manager is not the profit of your business.

Etsy also lets you download a spreadsheet of sold transactions. Its help page lists payment method, item price, item title and SKU (if you added one), and says nothing about profit or costs. The separate payment account CSV lists fees as rows, which is what a tracker or a spreadsheet can work from.

What a spreadsheet adds

A spreadsheet can hold what Etsy cannot: your cost per product. With formulas for fees, profit and margin, you get profit per order and per product, and you decide exactly how it is calculated. Our free Etsy profit spreadsheet does this, including profit per hour and a flag for products below your target margin.

The cost of a spreadsheet is your time. Each new order has to be typed or pasted in, you have to avoid importing the same orders twice, and when a material price changes you have to fix the formulas yourself. For a few orders a month that is fine. At a few dozen a month it becomes a chore, and chores are what get skipped.

What a profit tracker adds

CraftKept is an Etsy profit tracker. You upload your Etsy Payments CSV, enter your costs once per product (materials, packaging, and labor as hours times your rate), and it shows:

Profit by product, ranked by profit rather than by sales. A best seller and a best earner are often different products.
Costs applied automatically. A cost entered once applies to every past and future order of that product, and changing it updates the profit shown.
No double counting. Orders you already imported are skipped when you upload an overlapping file, and every import is listed.
A period view. Revenue, Etsy fees and what you kept for the months you choose, with fees split into six categories: transaction, listing, payment processing, Regulatory Operating Fee, currency conversion and Offsite Ads.
An export for your accountant. A CSV or PDF with the fee categories as separate columns, your costs, and monthly totals. It is source data, not a tax calculation.

Side by side

	Etsy's Earnings tab	A spreadsheet	CraftKept
Best for	Checking one order	A few orders a month	Profit by product across months
Your own costs	Not included in Etsy's totals	You enter and maintain them	Entered once per product, applied to all orders
Profit by product	Not shown	Yes, if you build it	Yes, ranked by profit
Fee detail	Fees and marketing costs per order	What you copy in	Six fee categories for any period
Duplicate orders	Not applicable	You check yourself	Skipped automatically
Effort per month	Open each order	Type or paste each order	Upload one CSV
Cost	Free	Free	$1 for the first 30 days, then $4.99 per month

Which one should you use?

Use the Earnings tab if you only want to know what a specific order earned after Etsy's charges.
Use a spreadsheet if you sell a few orders a month, like building the logic yourself, or want to see exactly how every number is calculated.
Use a tracker if you sell enough that typing orders has become something you put off, you have several products with different costs, or you want to know which products to make more of.

You can also start with the spreadsheet and move to a tracker later. Your product costs carry over, because they are the same numbers.

What CraftKept does not do

It reads the Etsy Payments CSV only. In-person sales or income from outside Etsy Payments are not included.
One account tracks one Etsy shop for now.
There is no screen for a single order with every fee line. For one order, Etsy's Earnings tab is better. In CraftKept, per-order detail is in the export file.
Matching orders to products is done by you, by picking the product for each order. It is not automatic yet.
It does not track inventory.
It has been tested on real Etsy exports from a Polish shop. Statements from other countries, including the US, are still being tested, so for those the free fee and profit calculator is the safer starting point.

Try it without paying

Start with the free Etsy fee and profit calculator for one sale, or the free profit spreadsheet for your whole shop. If you want profit by product without typing every order, see how CraftKept works. You can cancel before the trial ends from the account menu, and the first full charge comes after the 30 days.

Frequently asked questions

Does Etsy show my profit?

Etsy shows a Net profit figure in your payment account, but Etsy defines it as sales minus refunds, fees, shipping costs and taxes. Your own costs, such as materials, packaging and time, are not part of it.

Can I see the fees on one order in Etsy?

Yes. Open the order in Shop Manager and select the Earnings tab. It shows what the buyer paid, postage costs, marketing costs, fees, credits and refunds.

Is a spreadsheet good enough to track Etsy profit?

Yes, for a small shop. It gives you profit per order and per product for free. The trade-off is the time spent entering orders and keeping formulas correct.

What is the difference between an Etsy profit tracker and a spreadsheet?

A tracker imports your Etsy payment CSV, skips orders it already has, and applies each product's cost to every order automatically. A spreadsheet does the same only if you type, paste and maintain it yourself.

Do I need a profit tracker if I sell only a few orders a month?

Probably not. The Earnings tab or a spreadsheet is enough. A tracker becomes useful when entering orders by hand has become a task you avoid.

This guide is for planning, not tax or financial advice. CraftKept is not affiliated with Etsy.

Sources

Last verified: November 6, 2026.