You're passionate about baking and made it the trade that brings home the bread. While you've crafted delicious delectables to your signature style, you've probably noticed that running a bakery is no cakewalk.
In today's world, software and tools play a key role in all aspects of life — including your bakery. Like a model 21st-century citizen, you've researched the various bakery software tools.
The market is flooded with complicated-looking bakery software options, so selecting the right software might be difficult. Fear not, because we’ve investigated various types of bakery software. In this article, you'll find the five best bakery software programs — requiring absolutely zero technical skills — that will make your operations smoother than Le Beurre Bordier.
How Bakery Software Makes Your Life a Piece of Cake
Bakery software can make business processes and business operations a breeze, freeing up more time for you to focus on baking and the next award-winning cake recipe. The following are some bakery software features:
- Tracking your inventory use.
- Providing unique insights into sales and purchasing data.
- Offering multiple client relationship management (CRM) tasks.
- Optimizing your production processes, like adjusting recipes for scale.
- Customizing an online ordering system for takeout.
- Tracking expiration dates.
Bakery software can complete many tasks, improving your productivity and profitability. If you use bakery software effectively, you can free up more time for what you do best: baking.
The Ingredients of Our Decision
When comparing bakery software, keep an eye out for these key factors:
- Inventory Management is a bakery's lifeblood. If you don't manage raw-material inventory properly, production will suffer. Finished products must also be consistently available and accounted for. A solid inventory management system will sort out raw material and inventory needs.
- Recipe Management: Consistency in taste, texture, and appearance means your employees are replicating recipes. Bakery software can clearly illustrate recipes and provide special instructions to your employees to keep every batch up to your standards.
- Order Management: A bakery's success depends on its ability to manage orders efficiently. Your bakery software should offer a robust order management system tracking orders from placement to delivery, including special requests, delivery schedules, and customer information management. Employing this system will keep you organized and allow you to draw unique insights about your customers to identify profit opportunities.
- Ease of Use: The software should have an intuitive interface so every employee can learn quickly and use it fluently. Not everyone is tech-savvy, so an easy-to-use system will help ensure your staff can operate it without time-consuming training.
- Customization: Customizable software allows you to tailor your software to your thought process, business strategy, and the unique features of your bakery.
We considered these five points when seeking out software. What we found implements every point to some degree, but each individual software program shines in its own unique way. So, read on to determine which software will take–and manage–your bakery’s cake.
The Best Bakery Software Systems
- FlexiBake if you care about data for pastry optimization.
- Cybake if you want raw materials sourcing and market insights.
- POMeSYS if you want software to manage dozens of chain stores from a central location.
- Adalo if you want a fully customized bakery app that your customers will love.
- EasyBakePro if you’re scaling your recipes and need cost and revenue feedback.
FlexiBake: An Inventory Management Titan
What is it?: FlexiBake analyzes consumer behavior and determines your hottest items. It informs your delivery fleet about picks and navigates them to drop-off.
Why we like it: FlexiBake provides data-driven feedback about your client’s preferences. You can use these insights to determine shelf-clearing daily specials and hot seasonal items.
Who's it for: Bakeries that are infatuated with data. FlexiBake uses Jet 4.0 as its database and is fully compatible with Tableau. You can cook up some fresh graphs, charts, and heat maps using FlexiBake, showing the more frequent delivery routes.
Key Features:
- FlexiBake simplifies your bakery's business processes, like connecting your order sheet directly to your bookkeeping documents and inventory to save you trouble.
- You can track all inventory, from raw materials to finished goods.
- For bakeries providing deliveries, FlexiBake will provide your drivers with route navigation.
- FlexiBake leverages data programs, giving you insights on top-selling items, consumer behavior, and more.
- Cloud-based, remote access to handle your tasks from home or a beach in Bermuda.
Limitations:
- FlexiBake doesn't support a customer payment system, so you must rely on other methods.
- The FlexiBake software doesn't take customer orders, although you can integrate them into your purchasing software to collect order data.
- Handy features like warehouse and production management are only available through the FlexiBake Enterprise Option—you must contact them for pricing.
- Unless you purchase FlexiBake Enterprise, customer support is strictly by email—they're available 6 am to 6 pm, Pacific Standard Time.
- FlexiBake lite, the cheapest option, has few functions and no inventory management.
- While they offer a trial period, FlexiBake does not have a free version.
Pricing:
Five options are available:
- FlexiBake Lite: $95/month
- FlexiBake Standard: $225/month
- FlexiBake Professional: $295/month
- FlexiBake Corporate: $395/mont
- FlexiBake Enterprise: Call for pricing
Cybake: The Data Source
What is it?: Cybake stands out for its versatility in managing retail and wholesale bakeries. They’re also a market research company and provide subscribers with insightful market reports and analysis.
Why we like it: A customizable to user-specific needs interface accounts for your inventory and can prevent you from running out of stock. And we love the industry education market reports provide.
Who's it for: Cybake supports moonlighting side hustlers slinging cupcakes from their kitchens by night to wholesalers handling daily orders by the baker's dozen. Cybake's ease of use is compatible with all skill sets, so everyone on your team can use it.
Key Features:
- We love Cybake's smart recipe box that notifies you if you need to purchase more inventory for baking an upcoming product. It's inventory management at its finest.
- The CRM system allows you to manage, remember, and highlight specific customer needs so you don't forget any essential details.
- Cybake provides customizable data-management features, including visuals and reports, which will give you feedback about every aspect of your bakery.
- Streamlined order management simplifies how and when you work on customer orders–and if you deliver, Cybank optimizes all your supply chain needs and route details.
- Cybake provides insightful business intelligence reports, giving you a peek into what’s driving pricing and the market outlook.
- It's on the Azure cloud, giving you almost infinite space more secure than Fort Knox to store secret recipes and sensitive data.
Limitations:
- Being a one-stop shop has drawbacks: Cybake has a substantial learning curve.
- While a demo is available, Cybake doesn't offer a free option.
- Cybake only recently (March 2023) integrated with Square, but you may have difficulties integrating Cybake with other payment tools or software.
Pricing:
Cybake doesn't make pricing or plans available publicly. You'll have to book a demo and contact a sales agent.
POMeSYS Wholesale: For the Big Box Bakeries
What is it? POMeSYS Wholesale provides a full quiver of intricate inventory management tools, human resources (HR) applications, delivery route management, and even hardware specifically designed for the volume of large-scale operations.
Who's it for: This software appeals to medium-sized to large-scale enterprises. It has the storage capacity to meticulously manage massive inventories, recipes, and raw materials across hundreds of branch locations.
Why we like it: It conveniently bundles major software applications big bakeries require, from advanced financial, inventory, and recipe management to temperature control. We love the centralization this software offers because it can streamline a big bakery's software operations.
Key Features:
- They have a thick and impressive portfolio of features like HR management and payroll software, which can all be integrated.
- The features are comprehensive—there is no business process POMeSYS can't do.
- POMeSYS gives managers in one location the ability to control the temperatures of the dining area, walk-in fridges, and freezers of hundreds of facilities directly from the software.
- If the above temperatures fall out of the given range, you'll get a notification.
- One-stop shop finance suite allows for payments to suppliers, receiving payments from customers, invoice generation, and more.
Limitations:
- Multiple add-ons and their five-module library complicate what products to use.
- Do you need training? While POMeSYS gives users access to training material, you must pay extra fees if you require in-person training.
- While POMeSYS offers a limited-time free trial, pricing plans are unavailable online–you must contact them.
- As POMeSYS is highly customizable, the initial set-up period may be lengthy.
Pricing:
POMeSYS doesn't provide pricing or monthly subscription plans. After you sign up for a free trial, a sales agent will contact you and help you tailor a program for your large bakery.
Adalo: Simple, Sweet, and Customizable
What is it?: Adalo is a no-code app builder that allows you to construct your own native apps and make them available to your clients in app stores like Apple iOS and Google Play app stores.
Why we like it: With zero coding or computer engineering knowledge, you can build your own bakery app and publish it on the Google Play and Apple app stores. Bakeries can use the customizable features for production and order optimization.
Who's it for: The ability to sleekly customize Adalo makes it a prime candidate for people who want to customize their own unique ordering features, unleash a marketing campaign, or branch out to takeout.
Key Features:
- Adalo's free plan is expansive—it has many offerings that other companies charge for.
- With Adalo, bakeries can develop their own menu and seamlessly add or remove new products.
- Users can build an order management system unique to their bakery and taste, making order tracking and fulfillment easier than baking 3-ingredient cookies.
- Don't have enough room at your brick-and-mortar for tables? Adalo's got you covered—you can seamlessly create your own takeout app and receive orders promptly.
- Integrates smoothly with Stripe, Square, Paypal, and most other payment software.
- Nearly infinite app possibilities: if you want to enhance your customer experience by creating push notifications, loyalty apps, coupons, review pages, etc. - Adalo can likely do it.
Limitations:
- Adalo's learning curve might take more effort to use efficiently than other options.
- While Adalo is a customizable freeform app-builder, it’s not specifically designed as plug-and-play bakery software.
- Adalo excels at constructing an app providing customers with a quality user experience, but it might be time-consuming to construct an entire bakery management system on Adalo.
Pricing:
Adalo offers a free starter option; its subscriptions start at $36/month.
EasyBakePro: Bakery-centric Financial Management
What is it?: EasyBakePro's software specializes in tying costs into making your recipes profitable. It specializes in production planning and can give you an accurate idea of how much increased production will cost.
Why we like it: EasyBakePro fuses scheduling, production, and financial management in real-time on a customizable, user-friendly interface, illustrating how much production scale-ups will cost, allowing you to make informed production decisions.
Who's it for: Bakeries looking to scale can benefit from using EasyBakePro software. It shows you how much raw material is needed and the cost every time you enter new volumes.
Key Features:
- Want to learn how to use EasyBakePro? They offer a lengthy one-month free trial.
- For small bakery chains with a handful of locations, EasyBakePro serves as a reliable central database, acting as a "mini-cloud" for your company recipes, CRM, HR, and more.
- It manages your finances, inventory, and accounts and can provide insightful data and reports about your customer base and spending habits.
- The scalability feature reveals cost increases that will parallel production increases. You can leverage this when experimenting with that new cinnamon roll recipe—starting with a meager baker's dozen and steadily building up to hundreds by the day—EasyBakePro can determine how much extra cost you will pay when going from a small batch to a large one.
Limitations:
- While included in their target market, bigger bakeries might have issues integrating EasyBakePro's software.
- You may have difficulties integrating EasyBakePro into your payment system.
- The EasyBakePro software is very complicated, so developing an ability to unleash its full potential may take a while.
Pricing:
EasyBakePro requires a one-time set-up fee of $500. After that, you can either pay a monthly fee of $100/month (billed monthly) or an annual payment of $1,000/year (billed yearly).
Boiling Down Your Choices: What to Consider
After studying that list carefully, one of the first factors affecting your software choice should be the size of your bakery's team and operation. Smaller bakeries should best avoid enterprise-level software.
While we're preaching to the choir here, carefully consider your budget. You'll need to understand and use all the features your chosen software program offers - leaving features unused amounts to tossing your hard-earned cash into a piping hot oven.
The digital age is upon us — with many customers ditching cash for plastic, metal, or smartphones. Can your bakery software handle an increasing number of cashless payments?
You want to guarantee no hiccups when tracking your finances. Ensure your software is compatible with your payment system. Lacking this compatibility may lead to cash flow management problems and other yucky issues.
Control and Customize Your Bakery with Adalo
If you feel that none of the pre-packaged options on this list fit your needs, consider taking the plunge and building your own customizable software.
Adalo is the natural choice here, requiring no technical skills to get started. Choose from the long list of restaurant/bakery-centric templates. Build features like push notifications, product booking, takeout services, and more - you can literally construct your Adalo app like a Lego kit. Don't forget that Adalo smoothly integrates with most payment software!
Sounds like too much? Don't fret! Adalo's engineers designed their simple-to-use app builder with the 2023 layperson—not the Computer Scientist — in mind. Hundreds of bakeries like yours have already unleashed the power of Adalo to help them make more bread — literally and figuratively.
