My Candle Revenue Doubled but Cash in the Bank Did Not — How Do Inventory Purchases and Larger Production Batches Affect Cash Even When the Business Is Profitable?

Profit and cash answer two different questions

Gross profit asks: of the candles I sold this month, what did the materials inside them cost. It matches the cost to the sale, which is the right way to judge whether a product works. Cash asks something narrower and blunter: what left the account and what arrived in it, regardless of which month the candle was poured or sold. In a steady month the two nearly agree, because what you buy and what you pour are roughly the same. In a month that changes size, they come apart, and the size of the gap is the size of the change.

That is the whole explanation, and it is worth saying before any arithmetic: nothing has gone wrong. A business that doubles is buying for two different months at once — the candles it is selling now and the shelf it needs in order to keep selling at the new rate. The second of those is a one-off, and it is why the month you grow always feels worse at the bank than the month after it.

Everything below is run on one candle: 120 g of wax at an 8% fragrance load, which is 9.6 g of oil and 129.6 g poured, in a White Matte Glass Jar with a Thick (C2) Eco Candle Wick. That fill reading — load as a percentage of wax weight — is carried through every figure on the page. The materials cost ₹201.99 at live September 2026 rates: ₹76.44 of Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, ₹45.31 of Verbena, ₹70.80 for the vessel and ₹9.44 for the wick. The retail price of ₹649.00 and the volumes of 100 and 200 candles a month are illustrative.

The same month, told twice

Put the steady month and the doubling month side by side. Revenue doubles, gross profit doubles exactly — the unit cost has not changed, so it cannot do anything else — and the cash left after materials and parcels rises by 30.0%. That single comparison is the whole of your question, and it has an arithmetic answer rather than a mysterious one.

Read the last two rows together. Cash rose by ₹10,949.00 while gross profit rose by ₹44,700.80. The gap between profit and cash went from ₹8,189.80 to ₹41,941.60 — and that gap is not an error term. It is the sum of exactly two identifiable things, which the next section separates.

The bridge, line by line

A cash bridge is the least glamorous and most useful sheet in a small business. It starts at what the bank held on the first of the month, adds what came in, subtracts what went out line by line, and arrives at what the bank holds now. If it does not arrive, you have found something. Here it is for the doubling month, with an illustrative opening balance.

Now reconcile the two stories. Gross profit was ₹89,401.60. Cash movement before your own costs was ₹47,460.00. The difference of ₹41,941.60 is ₹25,201.60 of inventory build plus ₹16,740.00 of inbound parcels, and those two add to the gap exactly. That is the point of the exercise: once the bridge reconciles, the money is no longer missing, it is located, and you can decide what to do about each line rather than worrying about all of them at once.

Why doubling buys one and a half months of materials

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. If you hold one month of cover, then at 100 candles a month your shelf carries 100 candles' worth of materials, and at 200 it has to carry 200. In the month you move from one to the other you pour 200 candles and you also add 100 candles of shelf, so you buy materials for 300. There is no way around it that does not involve running out.

Two things are worth separating inside that ₹25,201.60. Most of it is the deliberate build: materials for the extra hundred candles you will pour next month, which you chose to hold. A smaller part is pack rounding — you cannot buy 36 kg of wax, so four 10 kg packs make it 40 kg. In the steady month pack rounding is the whole build, at ₹2,099.80, which is why a settled business barely notices the difference between profit and cash.

Note also what the pack ladder does and does not do here. Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 is ₹650.00 a kilogram in the 500 g and 1 kg packs and ₹637.00 a kilogram in the 5 kg and 10 kg packs — a step of ₹13.00 a kilogram that arrives at 5 kg and then stops, so there is nothing further up the ladder to reward a deeper buy. Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) are ₹9.44 each in every pack from 10 to 1,000. Whatever reason you have for buying deeper in a doubling month, a falling rate per kilogram is not it.

Inbound parcels are a cash line too

The doubling month's order weighs 201 kg once packed, and CSI's published rates are flat charges by weight band rather than a rate per kilogram. So the parcel cost depends not only on how much you buy but on how it is divided into consignments. Below is the doubling month's order shipped on the cheapest published combination as at September 2026, using each variant's stored packed weight rather than the weight printed on the label.

Two things stand out. The glass is 75% of the inbound weight and 32% of the spend, which is the usual shape of a container candle order and the reason vessel decisions move freight more than fragrance decisions do. And the split matters: bands are flat charges, so two parcels that each sit just inside a cheaper band can beat one that tips into a dearer one.

The steady month shows that clearly. Its wax order is a 10 kg pack and a 5 kg pack, which pack out at 11.0 kg and 6.0 kg. Sent together as one 17.0 kg consignment the published band is ₹2,400.00 on Expedited. Sent as two parcels they fall in the ₹1,200.00 and ₹630.00 bands on Standard, ₹1,830.00 in all — around a quarter less for exactly the same goods. Check the bands before you decide the shape of an order; there is no general rule that says bigger consignments are cheaper, and on this store there are places where they are not.

What you may not do is read a delivery promise into any of this. The published Standard rate names say "Delivery in 10-12 Days" and the Expedited descriptions say "3 Days Within Maharashtra, (4-5 days Rest of India)"; the shipping policy adds "Please allow 1-2 business days for order processing." Those are the store's own words and they are all this page will say about timing. There is no free-shipping threshold on the store, so no order size makes this line disappear.

How many days your money is out

Larger batches lengthen the pipeline as well as widening it. Money leaves when you pay CSI; it comes back when a customer pays you; and between those two events sit delivery, pouring, cure and time on the shelf. None of that is wasted, but all of it is funded by you.

Add the published legs alone and the money for a batch is committed roughly a fortnight before the first candle can be poured, and a further two to three weeks before it is fit to sell. That is why the doubling month is the hard one and the month after is easier: by then the pipeline is full and your buying has settled back to roughly what you pour.

It is also why the Indian festive calendar punishes late planners specifically on cash rather than on quality. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. Working back a 14 to 21 day cure plus inbound delivery, festive candles want to be poured by about mid-October and their materials ordered well before that — which means the festive stock build lands on a September or early October bank statement and the revenue lands in November. Two different months, one decision.

Building your own bridge from your bank statement

Run it for three consecutive months and the shape becomes obvious. A business at a steady size shows a small, stable gap between profit and cash, like the ₹8,189.80 in the steady month above. A business that is growing shows a gap that jumps in the month it changes size and then falls back. A business with a real problem shows a gap that grows every month and never unwinds, and that is the signal worth acting on quickly.

One last note on what this page is not. It is not financing advice and it takes no view on whether you should fund a stock build out of your own takings, on supplier terms, or any other way. Store prices include applicable taxes and GST invoicing is available; your own tax position, credit terms and financing are yours and your adviser's. What is on offer here is the arithmetic, so that the conversation you have with them starts from a sheet that reconciles.

Frequently asked questions