A customer pays a deposit today. The balance isn't due for another six weeks — sometimes longer, if the piece is backed up in production. Now multiply that by fifteen active orders, each at a different stage, each with a different amount already collected. Ask yourself one simple question: right now, across every open order, how much is still owed to you? For most made-to-order sellers, the honest answer isn't a number. It's “let me go check.”
The short version
Spreadsheets can track deposits, but they break down as order volume grows and depend entirely on someone remembering to update them. Xero and QuickBooks handle invoicing and reconciliation well, but neither has a native concept of a deposit tied to a specific order with an automatically updating balance — sellers end up hacking it together with negative line items or manual liability entries. Craftybase is built for materials, recipes, and inventory costing, not for tracking what's been collected versus what's owed order by order. None of the three general-purpose options were built to solve this specific problem — which is exactly the gap a purpose-built tool like Ordamo exists to close.
What “tracking deposits” actually means
Before comparing tools, it's worth being precise about what the job requires, because “tracking deposits” sounds simple and isn't. A real solution needs to:
- Record a partial payment against a specific order, not just against a customer in general.
- Calculate the remaining balance automatically, without a manual formula that breaks the moment someone edits the wrong cell.
- Show every open order's balance in one place, so you can answer “what's still owed to us” without opening each order individually.
- Stay accurate as order details change — a customer upgrades their fabric, adds a second piece, or the price shifts, and the balance needs to reflect that instantly.
Every option below does at least one of these well. None of them — except the one built specifically for this — does all four.
Option 1: the spreadsheet
Where it works
For a handful of orders, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. Columns for customer, order total, deposit paid, balance due and due date cover the basics, cost nothing, and require no onboarding. If you're taking two or three custom orders a month, there's no reason to replace this.
Where it breaks down as orders pile up
The trouble starts once you're juggling more open orders than you can hold in your head — for most sellers, somewhere between ten and twenty. Balance formulas get overwritten by accident. A payment gets logged in the wrong row. Someone forgets to update the sheet after a bank transfer lands, and three weeks later nobody remembers whether that order was ever paid down. The spreadsheet doesn't fail because it's the wrong idea — it fails because it depends entirely on manual discipline that doesn't scale. There's no reconciliation against what actually hit your bank account, and no view that updates itself when something changes upstream. We covered the broader version of this in five signs your business has outgrown spreadsheets.
Option 2: Xero and QuickBooks
What they're actually built for
Xero and QuickBooks are excellent at what they're designed for: invoicing, bank reconciliation, and tax-ready books. Send an invoice, get paid, watch it reconcile against your bank feed — for a single, complete transaction, this works exactly as intended.
Where deposits get messy
Neither platform has a native, first-class concept of “a deposit tied to a specific order, with an automatically updating balance.” In QuickBooks, sellers commonly add a line item called something like “customer deposit” to a new invoice and enter the previously received amount as a negative number, which zeroes out the liability and creates a receivable for the remaining balance. It works, but it's a manual step repeated per order, and it's easy to lose track of which deposits were already applied. Xero's approach has the same shape: the deposit is recorded as a liability, and someone manually allocates that credit against the invoice once raised.
That's a correct way to keep books clean for tax purposes — it was never meant to be a live, at-a-glance view of what's owed across dozens of active custom orders. More detail in why Xero and QuickBooks fall short for made-to-order sellers.
Option 3: Craftybase
What it's actually built for
A naming note first: as of September 2026 this is sold as Stocksmith — the same product formerly sold as Craftybase, with craftybase.com now redirecting to stocksmith.io. We use the older name here because it is the one most sellers know; nothing below changes under either.
Craftybase is built for makers who hold inventory and need real cost-of-goods tracking: materials, recipes, manufacture runs, and landed costs per product. If you're an Etsy or Shopify seller managing raw material stock across many SKUs, it's genuinely strong at giving you accurate margins.
Where it falls short on deposits
Craftybase does let you mark an order as paid, but that field exists for your own tracking — it isn't built around a payment schedule, a partial-deposit-then-balance workflow, or a running total of what's owed across open orders. Its whole model is oriented around materials flowing into manufacture runs, not cash flowing in over time on a single order. If your business is closer to “one client, one custom piece, deposit now, balance on completion” than to “stocked SKUs sold repeatedly,” its strengths mostly go unused — see our full Craftybase breakdown.
Option 4: purpose-built made-to-order software
This is the gap Ordamo was built to close. Instead of a workaround bolted onto invoicing software or a field borrowed from inventory tracking, it's built around the actual shape of a made-to-order business: a deposit comes in, production takes weeks, a balance is collected later, and at any moment you can see exactly what's owed across every order. It also ties that order to its production batch cost, so the deposit-and-balance view and the margin view come from the same record instead of two disconnected systems.
Deposits and balances in one place, instead of five spreadsheet tabs.
See how it worksSpreadsheet vs. Xero/QuickBooks vs. Craftybase vs. Ordamo
| Spreadsheet | Xero / QuickBooks | Craftybase (now Stocksmith) | Ordamo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Records a partial deposit | Manual entry | Manual workaround | Marks "paid," no schedule | Native |
| Auto-updates remaining balance | Only if formulas survive | Manual allocation per invoice | Not built for this | Automatic |
| Live view across all open orders | Only if kept current | Not order-specific | Not order-specific | Native |
| Reconciles against your bank | No | Yes | No | Depends on setup |
| Tracks batch cost and margin | No | No | Yes (inventory-based) | Yes (order-based) |
| Built for made-to-order deposits | No | No | No | Yes |
The question none of these tools were built to answer
Xero and QuickBooks were built to answer “what's outstanding on our invoices.” Craftybase was built to answer “what did this batch actually cost us.” None of them were built to answer the one question every made-to-order seller asks daily: across every order in production right now, how much is still owed to us?
How to tell which option fits your business
- A handful of orders a month, simple pricing, no urgency: a spreadsheet is still reasonable. Revisit it once volume climbs past what you can track from memory.
- You need clean, tax-ready books: keep Xero or QuickBooks — they're the right tool for reconciliation and filing, even if deposits still need to be tracked somewhere else.
- You hold finished inventory and sell repeatable SKUs: Craftybase's material and recipe tracking earns its cost.
- You take custom work with deposits and balances: that's the specific gap a purpose-built tool is meant to fill.
Curious which category your business actually falls into?
See how it worksFAQ
Can Xero or QuickBooks track deposits on custom orders at all?
Yes, but not natively as a linked, auto-updating balance. Sellers typically use a manual workaround — a negative line item in QuickBooks, or a manually allocated liability credit in Xero — that has to be repeated correctly for every order.
Is Craftybase good for tracking custom order deposits?
Craftybase — renamed Stocksmith in 2026, same team and same software — can mark an order as paid, but that's an informational flag, not a deposit-and-balance system. It's built for material and inventory costing, which is a different job.
What's actually wrong with just using a spreadsheet?
Nothing, at low volume. The problem is manual upkeep: formulas break, updates get missed, and there's no automatic tie to what's actually happened in your bank account. It scales poorly past a certain number of concurrent orders.
Do I need separate software just for deposit tracking?
Not necessarily, if your order volume is low. It becomes worth it once you're spending real time each week reconstructing what's owed across orders instead of just seeing it.
How should a deposit be recorded for tax purposes — as income or a liability?
Generally as a liability until the product or service is actually delivered, at which point it's reclassified as income. This is standard accounting practice in both Xero and QuickBooks, though applying it against a specific order requires manual steps in both.
What happens if a customer's order changes after the deposit is paid?
In a spreadsheet or a manual accounting workaround, you'll need to update the balance calculation yourself. A tool built around order-level deposits should recalculate the remaining balance automatically when the order total changes.
Can I use a purpose-built deposit tracker alongside Xero or QuickBooks?
Yes — most made-to-order sellers still need clean books for tax purposes, so a deposit-tracking layer typically sits alongside general accounting software rather than replacing it.
The bottom line
Spreadsheets, Xero, QuickBooks and Craftybase are all genuinely good at the jobs they were designed for — general bookkeeping, invoicing, reconciliation and inventory costing, respectively. None were designed around the specific rhythm of a made-to-order business: deposit now, production in between, balance later, repeated across a dozen or more orders at once. That's a narrow, specific gap, and it's the one a made-to-order-first tool exists to close.