Organization

What system of organization do you all have gong for you? I realized I spend most of my time switching crafting classes to get HQ ingredients for some things and I also spend timing looking for my stuff (I have a rough 'this retainer has that stuff' but it isn't perfect.)

Do any of you have a better system you use to keep organized? Do you take an hour or so and just turn all those steps into parts for later use? (Like making big batches of leather, etc.)

Organizing for a crafter with only 2 retainers is not an easy task at all..
What I have is, I have multiple characters, 2 retainers each. On the FC screen, I wrote down which mats they have under the character notes.

So character 1 has Lumbers
Character 2 has leathers, cloths, and reagents for WVR/LTW
Character 3 has ores
Character 4 has the food stuffs + ALC reagents..
Then rest I split up some extra overflow, or I'll have one of them temporarily hold something for the FC.

Then I use the fc chest to trade the items back and forth.

It is a pain sometimes to log on to a different character then back to get crafting, but I think it's worth avoiding the headache of trying to squeeze 500 items into 350 slots.
My main of course still has the higher tier mats that I use on a little more regular basis.

If you're a crafter, chances are you already have access to the fc chest.
Also, making an alt to level ~18 may feel like it's a huge pain and it is.. It takes a bit less than 10 hours but having those extra sell slots will let you sell so much non-popular stuff at higher mark ups, it will expand your market share just by having those extra sell slots.

Wish we could have a crafting retainer similar to the crafting bank in GW 2.

1st retainer is exclusively for "ingredients"
2nd retainer is skins, leathers, and reagents
3rd retainer is stones, lumber, and cloth
4th retainer is misc. basically i have an assortment of glamour gear, fish, materia, seeds, and soil

I tend to only keep 1 stack of nq and 1 of hq of each item.(some things i do have more, but its a general rule)
Any item i can buy from vendor i don't keep in retainers(quiksilver, iron ore, rock salt, olives, etc.) theres simply not enough space.

And i sometimes pre-make things out of the nq parts i have(cobalt ignots, raptor leathers, rosewood lumber, etc) but mostly i dont and just make what i need when i need it.

I prepare ingots, lumbers and cloths just after getting nesessary materials. Then sell HQs that randomly happens during batch crafts to save storage space.
Most of food and alc ingredients doesn't costs a lot, so, i buy such on the market when needed.

I don't craft a wide range of products, so I only hold on to a small range of crafting mats.

If a friend asks me to craft something I don't usually craft (doesn't happen super often), I either refer them to another crafting friend who may be online or I buy (or gather, if the mat isn't from an unspoiled node and isn't super cheap) the mats on an as-needed basis.

I only keep raw materials that can't be bought from vendors (and that I'm actually likely to use). First retainer has most of my mats, second has gemstones (and gear/dye/materia/misc), and I keep the really commonly used ones (like cobalt ore and fleece) on me. When I go to craft, I look up all I'll need and first go for mats sold at beast tribes, then pull out what I need from retainers for crafting (do all leathers first, then cloth, then metal, or whatever). I'm at the point where I can NQ all and sell accidental HQ mats on MB, but I used the same system when I made HQ mats. I keep a spreadsheet for crafts I do often (GC turn ins, spirit bonding gear), and use http://ffxivcrafting.com/equipment to keep myself organized when putting together gear for a class.

On my main I have ingredients/mats split between 2 retainers.

On an alt though I have all ingredients/mats on the same retainer.

The second way is so much nicer..

It's just. So. Much. Better.

I would love SE to readjust the UI in some form so that we can get to retainer storage unilateral-like.

I only have one character with two retainers. Grant it I was not heavy into crafting until the last month. Still I had a decent organization I think.

My primary retainer had all the mats that I was currently using for my crafts. I leveled my crafts from 1 - 30 with each other to keep materials relevant. Tab one was metal, two was lumber and so on. This wasn't perfect, as sometime metal would go into the next tab when I got into needing basilisk stone, gems and what not. But I knew all my materials was on one retainer.

My secondary retainer was used for Equipment I might find, Aetherial or better specifically, to set aside for later classes. Also if I found materials that I wasn't able to use yet. My crafting was behind my class for a bit, so I had a large amount of diremite sinews and webs in her back tabs waiting for weaver to catch up.

Once I leveled out of a mat, I would either vendor or MB it.

I use the MB and 1.5 retainers. I generally do not keep vast quantities of anything, nor do I keep rarely used materials. I may make 10-15% less profit this way, but when I sell an item that cost me 1/3 - 1/10 of what I can sell it for, I really don't care for the slightly higher cost of buying the ingredients.