My Raw-Material Inventory Is Increasing Faster Than Sales — How Do I Determine Whether I'm Buying Too Much Wax, Fragrance or Packaging?

One stock figure, four separate questions

You noticed the problem the way everyone notices it: the stock on the shelf is worth more than it was three months ago and the monthly sales figure has not moved. That is a real signal and it is worth acting on. It is also, on its own, useless — because the rupee value of your shelf is four different materials, bought in four different units, at rates that differ by a factor of more than a hundred per unit, averaged into one number. Averaging is exactly the operation that hides which line moved.

Consider what the four materials in a container candle actually are. Wax is bought by the kilogram and poured by the gram. Fragrance oil is bought by the kilogram and poured by the gram, but at a tenth of the weight and several times the rate. Vessels are bought and used one for one. Wicks are bought and used one for one. A candle consumes all four in a fixed ratio, so if your buying were perfectly matched to your pouring, all four shelves would rise and fall together. They never do, and the reason is not discipline. It is that the smallest pack CSI sells of each material covers a different number of candles.

So the diagnostic has to be run four times, once per material, in that material's own unit. Rupees come in at the very end, to tell you how much the answer is worth. If you run it in rupees from the start, the most expensive material dominates every line of the table and you will conclude that fragrance oil is your problem, because fragrance oil is always the biggest number on a candle costing sheet. In the worked quarter below, fragrance oil is the second-best behaved of the four.

Everything on this page is run on an illustrative business pouring 400 candles a month of a single recipe: 180 g of wax at an 8% fragrance load, which is 14.4 g of oil and 194.4 g in the jar, plus one vessel and one wick. That fill reading — load as a percentage of wax weight — is carried through every figure on the page. The production rate, the opening stock and the pack counts bought are illustrative and are stated as such wherever they appear; the rates are CSI's live September 2026 prices.

Purchases against consumption, one quarter at a time

Pick a period long enough that a single large order does not distort it and short enough that you can still remember what happened. A quarter works. For each material write two numbers: everything that came in, and everything that went into a candle. You already have both — purchases are on your CSI order history and consumption is your candle count multiplied by the recipe.

Consumption first, because it is pure arithmetic. At 400 candles a month the recipe eats 72.00 kg of wax, 5.76 kg of fragrance oil, 400 vessels and 400 wicks every month — so over a quarter, 216.00 kg, 17.28 kg, 1200 and 1200. Nothing in those figures is an estimate: they are 400 multiplied by 180 g, by 14.4 g, by one and by one.

Read the fourth column and the diagnosis is already done. Wax at 1.02 and fragrance at 1.04 are buying within two parts in fifty of what they are using — that is as tight as whole packs allow, because you cannot buy 0.4 of a wax sack. Wicks at 1.25 are running ahead, which one extra 500-pack explains entirely. Vessels at 1.67 are in a different category: for every three candles poured, five vessels came in.

Cover and turns: the same fact, two ways of saying it

The ratio is a flow measure — it compares two things that happened over a period. Cover is a stock measure: how many months the shelf would last at your current pour rate if you never ordered again. They can disagree completely, and when they do the disagreement is the most useful thing on the page.

Closing stock is opening plus purchases minus consumption, which for the worked quarter gives 34 kg of wax, 4.72 kg of oil, 1,300 vessels and 900 wicks. Divide each by the monthly consumption and you have cover in months. Divide twelve by cover and you have the annualised turns figure an accountant would ask for — the same fact, rescaled.

Now the disagreement. Wax has the best ratio on the page and the worst cover: 0.47 months, which at 400 candles a month is about 14 days of production. Vessels have the worst ratio and the most comfortable cover at 3.25 months. If you acted on the ratio alone you would cut the vessel order and leave wax as it is, and within three weeks you would be short of wax. The two measures are asking different questions and you need both answers before you change an order.

One structural point about turns. A turns figure of 25.4 on wax against 3.7 on vessels looks like a damning comparison, and in a sense it is, but the two numbers are not equally controllable. Wax is sold in 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg packs, so a business pouring 72 kg a month can land within a few kilograms of its need every single time. Vessels are sold in packs of 100. At 400 candles a month across several colours and styles, whole packs of 100 are a coarse instrument, and the coarser the instrument the higher the cover you end up carrying. Some of the vessel line is behaviour and some of it is arithmetic.

Where the money actually went

Value each closing count at CSI's live September 2026 rate — wax at ₹507.40 a kilogram in the 10 kg pack, oil at ₹3,738.00 a kilogram in the 1 kg pack, vessels at ₹21.24 a piece in the pack of 100, wicks at ₹5.90 each — and the shelf that was worth ₹44,334.00 at the start of the quarter is worth ₹67,816.96 at the end. That is ₹23,482.96 of growth, and it reconciles exactly against the purchases: ₹2,30,242.00 of materials came in and ₹2,06,759.04 of materials went into 1,200 candles.

The share column is the sentence you were looking for when you opened this page. 72.4% of the growth is vessels. The extra 800 vessels bought beyond what was poured are worth ₹16,992.00 on their own. Fragrance oil, the line you probably suspected because it is the biggest number on every costing sheet, contributed ₹2,691.36 — about a ninth of the problem. Wax contributed ₹2,029.60.

It is worth being precise about what that money is and is not. It is not a loss. Vessels do not expire, they do not discolour, and at 3.25 months of cover they will all be used. What has happened is that ₹16,992.00 has moved from your bank account to your shelf, where it cannot pay a courier bill or buy a kilogram of the wax you are two weeks away from running out of. That is a liquidity fact, not an accounting loss, and it is why a profitable month can still feel tight.

Why the cheapest line is usually the culprit

There is a mechanical reason the vessel line ran away, and once you see it you will predict which material will do it in your own business. Divide each pack by what one candle takes and you get the pack's life in candles. On this recipe, one 10 kg wax pack is about 56 candles. One 1 kg bottle of oil is about 69 candles. One vessel pack of 100 is exactly 100 candles. One wick pack of 500 is 500 candles.

Now read the last column as a habit rather than a table. If you place one order a month and put one of each item in the basket, you are buying 0.14 months of wax, 0.17 months of oil, 0.25 months of vessels and 1.25 months of wicks in a single click. Repeat that twelve times and the wick shelf grows nine times faster than the wax shelf without a single bad decision being made. The pack that covers the most candles is the pack that quietly accumulates.

That is why the wick line sat at 1.25 and the vessel line at 1.67 while the two materials you think of as expensive behaved perfectly. Wax and oil are sold in sizes that let you land close to a month's need, so your ordering is naturally self-correcting. Vessels come in hundreds and you buy several colours, so every reorder rounds up several times at once. Wicks come in packs of 500 and one pack is already more than a month.

The remedy is not to buy the smallest pack of everything — the smallest wick pack is ₹118.00 for 20, which is ₹5.90 a wick, the same rate as the 500 pack, so there is nothing to gain per piece and a great deal of ordering effort to lose. The remedy is to order each material on its own clock: wax and oil every month, vessels when you drop below your reorder point, wicks once a quarter. One basket, four cadences.

Counting your own shelf, in one evening

If you want a single number to track month on month, use the highest ratio on the table rather than the average of the four. The average is reassuring and useless: a business buying wax at 0.9 and vessels at 1.7 averages to 1.3, which describes neither material and hides the one that needs action.

When a ratio above 1 is the right answer

Today is 29 September 2026 and Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. A soy container candle wants a 14 to 21 day cure before it is burnt — the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page describes strong cold and hot throw and the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page says to cure for a minimum of 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks — so festive stock has to be poured by roughly mid-October, which means the materials for it have to be bought now. A business running a ratio of 1.4 on wax and oil through September and October is not overbuying. It is on schedule.

So the diagnostic has a seasonal reading as well as a structural one. Compare the same quarter year on year rather than quarter on quarter where you can, and where you cannot, at least annotate the table: which of these ratios is a festive build that will unwind by December, and which is a pattern that has been running all year. The vessel line in the worked quarter is the second kind. It did not start in September and it will not unwind in December, because nothing about a plain votive glass is seasonal.

Three other legitimate reasons for a ratio above 1. You are launching a new scent and have bought its first kilogram before the first candle exists. You have just moved a recipe from 150 g to 180 g and the consumption side of your table has not caught up. Or you have deliberately taken cover on a line with a long inbound lead time — monsoon weeks in Mumbai, Kochi and Kolkata genuinely disrupt courier schedules, and a business that holds an extra fortnight of wax through July is making a considered trade, not a mistake. Write the reason next to the ratio. A ratio with a reason is a plan.

What the four-material count cannot see

The word "packaging" in your question is doing two jobs. The vessel is packaging in the sense that the customer sees it and it holds the product, and CSI sells it, so it is on the table above with a rate and a count. Everything else that goes around a finished candle — the label, the carton, the mailer, the crinkle filler, the ribbon, the insert card, the tape — is packaging too, and CSI does not sell most of it. Those lines are real, they accumulate exactly the same way, and this page will not put a number on any of them.

There is a particular reason to run the test on labels. Label print runs have minimum quantities, often in the thousands, and a design change orphans the entire remaining run. That is the one packaging line where a high cover figure can turn into an actual write-off rather than a liquidity problem, because a vessel is still a vessel next year and a label with last year's SKU name on it is not. If your ratio on labels is above 2 and you are still refining your branding, that is the number to act on first, ahead of anything on the CSI side of the table.

Two further limits worth stating plainly. The count says nothing about whether the stock you hold is the stock you need — 1,300 vessels is comfortable cover in total and could still be 900 of a colour that does not sell and 400 of one that does. And it says nothing about condition: wax that has spent a Nagpur summer at 44°C on a metal rack is not the same asset as wax stored cool and dark, even though it weighs the same. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a 60 month shelf life in cool, dry storage and asks you to keep it away from sunlight and moisture; that is a storage instruction, not a guarantee against a hot warehouse.

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