I Have ₹1 Lakh Available for Raw-Material Inventory — How Do I Decide How Much Should Go into Wax, Fragrance Oils, Wicks and Jars Based on Actual Monthly Consumption?

Monthly consumption in rupees

Our example business pours 320 candles a month, each 200 g at an 8% fragrance load in a White Matte Glass Jar (200 g is a tested fill you should confirm in your own jar; the jar's fill weight is not published). Four scents share the sales: Lavender 35%, British Rose 25%, Dark Vanilla 20% and Sandalwood 20%. These are example figures — the method needs only your own monthly units, fill, load and scent mix.

Each candle is 184 g of wax and 16 g of oil. Add a 3% pour-loss allowance to wax and oil, 2% to wicks for defects and 1% to glass for breakage — all labelled working assumptions. Then price each line at the rate you will actually pay: wax at ₹599.00 a kilo (the 5 kg bag), each oil at its 1 kg per-gram price, wicks at ₹5.90 and jars at ₹70.80.

Material cost per candle is ₹275.57, before labels, boxes, freight, labour and GST. The jar is the surprise for many makers: at ₹70.80 it costs more than the wax in the candle (₹113.52 with loss). Any budget split that treats glass as a small line will run out of jars first.

The split that gives equal cover

Divide the budget in the same proportions as the monthly bill. Each line then buys the same number of months of its own consumption, because every line gets budget ÷ total monthly value = 1.134 months of itself.

Within the oil line, split again by each scent's own monthly value, not by its share of sales. Dark Vanilla is 20% of sales but, at ₹7.65 a gram, 29.8% of the oil bill; British Rose is 25% of sales but only 15.0% of the bill at ₹3.07 a gram. So Dark Vanilla gets ₹9,145.03 and British Rose ₹4,586.87 — and both still last 34 days.

Why an equal split fails

Production needs all four at once, so the business can pour for only 20.6 days — about 220 candles — before wax runs out. At that point it holds more than a year's wicks and several weeks of jars, bought with money that should have been wax. The consumption-share split buys 34.0 days of everything for the same ₹1,00,000.

Rounding each line to real packs

Budgets are rupees; stock comes in packs. Round each line down to what its own budget buys — rounding up would take money from another line. Here is the consumption-share allocation turned into real CSI packs:

After rounding, ₹97,601.28 is spent and ₹2,398.72 is left. The line with the least cover is Dark Vanilla at 31.3 days, so the leftover goes there first — a 100 g bottle, a pack of five jars or a 1 kg bag of wax, whichever the leftover covers. Small differences in days of cover after rounding are normal; what matters is that no line is weeks shorter than the others.

Topping up existing stock

Most budgets are not spent on an empty stock room. If you already hold some wax, a bottle or two of each oil and a few jars, the aim is the same — every line lasting the same number of days — but the spend is different. Convert each line's stock to days of cover, then fill the thinnest lines first until all reach a common level. With ₹1,00,000 and the example shelf below, that common level is:

The shelf already held ₹30,508.26 of stock, so ₹1,00,000 lifts every line to 44.4 days. Dark Vanilla and jars, the thinnest, get the most; British Rose, already well stocked, gets the least. If any line already had more cover than the common level, it would get nothing and the level would be recalculated across the rest. Round each spend to packs as before.

The same method works at any budget. ₹50,000 buys half the days; ₹5 lakh buys five times as many — though at that point it is worth checking whether that much cover makes sense for oils and wax you will hold for months, and whether larger quantities should be quoted. I Can Get a Better Wax Price if I Buy 100 Kg Instead of 25 Kg — How Do I Determine Whether My Current Sales Are High Enough to Justify the Larger Purchase? and My Fragrance Supplier Offers a Better Rate at 5 Kg — How Many Monthly Candle Sales Do I Need Before Buying That Quantity Makes Sense? test whether a bigger single purchase earns its keep, I Want to Keep 30 Days of Candle Raw-Material Inventory — How Do I Convert Monthly Unit Sales into Kilograms of Wax and Fragrance Stock? converts sales into 30 days of kilograms, and I'm Planning Production for the Next Three Months — How Do I Convert My Candle Sales Forecast into a Purchasing Plan for Wax, Fragrance Oils, Wicks and Jars? spreads a budget over a three-month plan.

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