Dreamward is gross-margin tracking and Schedule-C P&L for small businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets. You connect the places your money actually moves — Shopify, Wix, Square, your event markets, your manual receipts — and Dreamward tells you what every sale was really worth after the cost of goods, and what your accountant needs at tax time.

It is nota replacement for QuickBooks or Xero. It doesn't do payroll, it doesn't reconcile your bank, it doesn't cut checks. What it does do — and does well — is answer the question “am I actually making money on this product, in this channel, this month?” And it answers that question without making you re-enter every order by hand.

Dreamward works for several kinds of small business. The path you take through this guide depends on what you actually sell:

• Online seller (Square or Square Online): start by connecting Square — your sales pull in automatically. Then import your products (one click) and set their costs, and per-SKU margin appears. (On Shopify, Wix, or Etsy? Automatic sync is coming soon — for now, export your orders and bring them in via CSV upload.)
• Market or event vendor(booth at the farmer's market, craft fairs, pop-ups): start by logging an event, then upload your day's sales as a CSV batch-tagged to that event.
• Wholesale or service business (B2B invoices, consulting, custom orders): start by creating an invoice — those roll into the Wholesale or Service channel automatically.
• Mixed (most makers): do all three. The Dashboard will show per-channel margin so you can see which line of business is actually carrying the others.

If you're in “just trying it” mode, do the online path first — it's the fastest way to see real data flowing without typing anything in by hand.

Open Integrations from the header nav. Click “Connect” on the Squarecard (Shopify, Wix, and Etsy are marked “coming soon” while their app-store approvals land). It walks through an OAuth handoff — Dreamward redirects you to Square, you authorize, it redirects you back.

Once connected, Dreamward does two things in the background:

1. Backfills your order history.Square starts with the last 90 days, extendable from the integration card. The backfill runs server-side — close the tab if you want, it'll keep going.
2. Keeps it synced.Square sends real-time webhooks — every new order, refund, or fulfillment event hits Dreamward within seconds. You don't click “sync.”

No online store? You have three other ways to get sales in. For a one-off cash, Venmo, or word-of-mouth sale, hit “+ Add a sale” on the Transactions page — it defaults to the Direct channel. For a market, use events + Market Day (section 5). And to bulk-import history — or a one-off spreadsheet — use the Upload button (CSV, TSV, or XLSX).

This is the section that makes Dreamward worth paying for. Open SKUs & Components in the header — your catalog of products (the finished goods you sell) and components(the raw materials they're made from). Connecting a store pulls your salesin automatically — but it doesn't build this catalog for you; those products first arrive unmatched. You populate the catalog yourself, fastest via Bulk import (one click pulls every product from Square, Shopify, or Wix — Square even brings the costs you set in its Item Library). You can also paste from a spreadsheet, map products from the Unmatched queue as they sell, or add SKUs by hand.

How costing works — FIFO. Dreamward costs your sales first-in, first-out: it draws down your oldest stock at the price you actually paid for it, and only moves to a newer purchase price once that older batch runs out. If a single sale — or a single production batch — spans two purchase prices, it blends them automatically. Your cost of goods always reflects the real money that left your bank.

Where costs come from. Two ways a cost basis gets set:

• Receive a purchase into stock (the main way for makers). When you buy materials — a bank transaction, an uploaded supplier invoice, or a manual expense — open it and choose Receive into inventory. Pick the component and the quantity it bought; Dreamward adds that quantity as a cost layer priced at what you paid (amount ÷ quantity), and keeps the expense and the inventory in sync.
• Type a cost directlyon a SKU's detail page — handy for a starting count, or for a product you cost as a flat estimate rather than from a recipe.

For makers — recipes & production runs. If you build products from raw materials, define a recipe on the product's detail page: list each component and how much goes into one finished unit, in its own unit of measure (grams, ml, each). When you make a batch, click Log production run — Dreamward draws down the component stock (oldest cost layers first) and stamps the finished batch with its real blended cost. A “can make ~N” readout tells you how many more you can build with the materials on hand.

Tracking stock on hand. Every SKU tracks its unit count. Sales auto-decrement finished goods as they sync from Shopify, Wix, or Square. The SKU detail page shows a Cost layers panel — each open batch, oldest first, with how much is left and what it cost — plus a full history of every stock adjustment.

Pricing for your time (optional). Set a labor rate in Settings, then enter the minutes-per-unit on a product, and its detail page shows a fully-loaded cost and margin after labor — so you can tell whether a price actually pays for your time. This is a pricing aid only; it never touches your taxes, Net Profit, or cost of goods.

Selling at events is different from selling online — you don't have a webhook stream. You have a cash drawer, a Square reader, a Venmo handle, and a notebook. Dreamward handles this through the Events page.

Click Events in the header, then “+ New event.” Fill in:

• Name (“Sunday farmer's market”)
• Date
• Booth fee (auto-counted as a Markets channel expense)
• Mileage (round-trip distance — Dreamward applies the current IRS rate automatically)

Now you have an event to tag sales to. Two ways to log the day's revenue:

1. One-line summary: just enter the total revenue on the event itself (“Sunday market — $485 in cash and Venmo”). Fast, but you lose per-product breakdowns.
2. CSV batch upload(recommended for any event over ~10 transactions): click the “Upload” button in the header, pick your CSV, and on the review screen choose your event from the dropdown. Every row gets batch-tagged to that event and flows into Markets channel.

Expenses are what your business spends — supplies, packaging, SaaS subscriptions, vendor bills, rent on your studio. Open the Expenses page.

Click “+ New expense” and fill in vendor, amount, date, and category. The category determines whether this is a Cost of Goods Sold expense (raw materials, inventory) or an Operating Expense (rent, SaaS, marketing). Dreamward tags COGS categories automatically based on your industry preferences — Schedule-C will split them correctly.

Got a PDF invoice from a supplier? Skip the typing. Hit Upload in the top nav and drop the PDF — Dreamward reads the vendor, amount, date, and a category off the document, shows them for a quick review, then saves the transaction and keeps the original PDF attached to it, downloadable any time. (CSV/TSV/XLSX upload works too, for a batch of rows.)

Attaching a receipt: every expense row has a drag-drop file area. Drop in the PDF, JPG, or PNG. It uploads to a private storage bucket (encrypted at rest, only visible to you) and attaches to the expense permanently. This is your audit defense — the IRS wants a receipt for any expense over $75, and Dreamward keeps them organized by year and category so you can find one in seconds.

The Processedtab on the Dashboard is your work queue. Anything that came in from a connected store, a CSV upload, or manual entry lands here in card form until you've told Dreamward what to do with it.

Each card has four status buttons at the bottom:

• Pending — invoice or expense awaiting payment
• Paid — done, money has moved
• Overdue — past due date, needs follow-up
• Needs review — something looks wrong, defer until you can check it

Click the icon matching the row's actual state. By default, anything marked “Paid” disappears from the inbox view — the tab acts like an email inbox where settled items archive themselves. The tab counter at the top shows how many items still need attention, not how many you've ever processed. If you need to find a paid item later, click “Show settled” on the tab.

Each card also shows a Channelrow — Shopify, Wix, Square, Markets, Wholesale, Service work, or Uncategorized. That tag determines which Dashboard rollup the row contributes to. If Dreamward guessed wrong (or couldn't guess), click the pencil icon next to the channel name and pick the right one. Your selection sticks across re-imports.

The Dashboard tab is the answer to “am I making money?” The three big cards at the top — Total Sales, Total Expenses, Net Profit — cover the year to date. Most users glance at Net Profit first and move on if the number is green and growing.

Below that, the Channels card is the real payoff. Each row is one of your revenue sources (Shopify, Markets, Wholesale, Service work, etc.) with its own Revenue, Direct Expenses, and Net. The bar on each row is scaled to the channel with the largest revenue, so you can see relative size at a glance. If your Markets row is twice as long as your Shopify row, event sales are carrying you.

Click any populated channel card to drill into the rows backing those numbers — you land on the relevant page (Events for Markets, Integrations for Shopify, etc.) filtered to that channel.

COGS & Gross Margin is the bottom section. It shows the last 30 days of mapped line items, grouped by SKU, with Revenue / COGS / Gross Margin per row. This is where the costs you set in section 4 pay off — you can see which products have the fattest margins and which are barely breaking even. Click any figure to drill into the exact sales and the FIFO cost layers behind it.

Open Reports (included on every plan). Pick a year, click “Generate.” You get a true Schedule-C-formatted P&L:

• Revenue (by channel)
• Cost of Goods Sold
• Gross Profit (Revenue minus COGS)
• Operating Expenses (by category — rent, SaaS, marketing, etc.)
• Net Profit

This is the same structure your CPA will use to fill out the IRS Schedule C. The categories map directly to the IRS line items, so your accountant doesn't have to re-bucket anything.

From the report page you can:

• Download PDF — formatted for printing or emailing
• Download CSV — for spreadsheets, or to import into your CPA's tax software
• Email to your accountant — enter their email, Dreamward sends both files with a short cover note from your business name

You've hit the main loop. From here:

• Set a weekly habit— 10 minutes every Friday to reclassify any Uncategorized rows, mark settled invoices Paid, and skim the Dashboard. That's genuinely all the bookkeeping most makers need.
• Watch the COGS & Gross Margin section— once you have 30+ days of data, you'll see which products are quietly losing money. Raise their prices or stop making them.
• Reach out if you get stuck — email support anytime. Growth and Pro tiers get priority response times if you need answers fast.
• Check the Inventory page— see total stock value, what's running low, and which products you're out of materials for, all in one place. Set a reorder point on any SKU and it flags when stock drops to that level. Your inventory value flows into the ending-inventory line on your tax reports.
• Explore the reference guides back on the Help hub for deeper dives into each section (most are still being written — check back).

Stuck on something this guide didn't answer? Email us at Dreamwardsystems@gmail.com — every question becomes a guide section so the next person doesn't have to ask.