Small Bakery Desk

Bake plan

One line per product per bake day. Bake today is counter par plus pre-orders plus wholesale, less what carries over; Batches to mix divides it by the recipe's yield.

Custom cake orders

Special orders from the first inquiry to the moment the customer walks out with the box.

Products and recipes

Each product's batch yield, recipe cost, labor, prices, margins and counter par. Open a product to see and add its recipe lines.

Wholesale accounts

Who you deliver to, on which route and terms, what they take each week and what they owe.

Ingredients and suppliers

Stock against reorder points, with the allergen of every ingredient on the shelf.

A day at the bakery

What lives where

Three rules that keep it honest

Standing orders by delivery day

Copy the pieces for tomorrow's weekday into Wholesale pieces on each bake line.

Cakes coming up

Ingredients to order before the cut-off

Cakes in the next 7 days

Invoices past due

Margins by product

Reading the numbers

Where par sits in the bake

Each line on the bake plan adds three things and takes one away. Counter par is looked up from the product. Pre-orders are the boxes already promised for that day, including any cake-order add-ons such as a dozen cupcakes. Wholesale pieces are copied from the standing orders for that weekday. Carried over is what is still sellable from the day before: a sourdough loaf is fine on day two, a croissant is not, so croissants always carry zero. Bake today is the result, and Batches to mix rounds it up to whole batches.

Setting a first par

Reading sell-through

At close, the counter enters Left at close on each bake line. Sell-through is baked less left over, as a share of what was baked. For bread, 85 to 95 percent is healthy. Above 98 percent most days means you are selling out early and should raise the par by a batch's worth over two weeks. Under 85 percent three days in a row means lower it.

A weekly par review (15 minutes, Monday)

Taking the inquiry

Quoting and the deposit

Price from servings, then add design time. Our starting points are about 4 dollars a serving for buttercream, more for fondant panels, sugar flowers or hand painting, and a fixed charge for delivery and set-up. Enter the Quoted price and move the order to Quoted. Deposit asked works out half automatically.

The date is held only when the deposit is paid. When it arrives, press Mark deposit paid: the status changes and the date is stamped. Deposits are not refunded inside seven days of pickup, because by then we have bought, baked and frozen the layers; say so when you quote.

Production week

At pickup

How cost per piece is built

Cost per piece is ingredients plus labor, divided by the batch yield, plus packaging. Use the yield you actually get on a normal day, after scraps and the odd misshapen piece, not the number the recipe promises.

A worked example: butter croissant

Notice where the money goes: butter is about three quarters of the ingredient cost, and lamination time is nearly as much again. A two-cent rise in butter per kilogram barely shows; losing ten croissants a batch to bad shaping costs more.

Pricing rules we use

Monthly cost check

The chain of truth

When a recipe changes or a supplier swaps a brand, walk the chain in that order the same day. A chocolate that adds soy lecithin, or a seed mix packed on a line with peanuts, changes the product even if the recipe card does not.

The nine we declare

We label for milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame, fish and shellfish, and we add rye and barley as gluten so that customers avoiding gluten are not misled by a wheat-free rye. Sesame is the one bakeries forget: it travels on seeded breads and in shared bins.

Shared equipment and may-contain

When a customer asks

New product checklist

Standing orders

Each standing order is one product on one delivery day for one account: Tamarack Coffee Bar gets 24 butter croissants every Monday and Thursday, so that is two rows. The account's Standing orders per week adds them up at today's wholesale price, which is the number to watch when an account asks for a discount.

The delivery morning

Weekly invoicing (Friday)

Chasing what is owed

The Invoices I am chasing list on the Dashboard shows the ones assigned to you. Assign one by setting Chasing to yourself.