Bakery software for UK bakeries, built around the night bake and the counter

Most bakers who look for bakery software in the UK start with the till. Yet the work that eats the week happens before the shop opens and after it shuts. At half three the dough for 180 loaves has proved, at half seven the first collection slot opens, at ten a customer collects a lemon sponge for twelve, and at two six cakes go out to a village hall for a christening. In between, someone phones for a birthday cake with no nuts.

In most bakeries those two clocks, the night in the bakehouse and the day at the counter, run on an order book, a whiteboard and the memory of whoever has been there longest. That holds until a second shop opens, a new baker starts on nights, or an allergy gets lost between the phone and the bench.

Below, need by need: what we can build next to your till, which rules from the Food Standards Agency and Natasha's Law a bakery wants built into its system, and how much software suits a sole trader or a bakery with three shops.

We don't replace the till. Square, Lightspeed or whatever your supplier fitted does its job at the counter. What we build talks to it where the till allows; how that works is under API integration. The cost of a till on its own is in Lightspeed pricing.

Orders are the heart of a bakery that grows. A customer who wants a birthday cake at nine in the evening orders from the baker who lets them. Online ordering for a bakery isn't a clothes shop: you sell something that doesn't exist yet, for a fixed moment, and it has to be ready at half seven.

So we build it around three things. First the collection slot: the customer picks a half hour, and whoever comes at 7.30 doesn't queue behind the 8.30 orders. Then the celebration cake: how many it serves, flavour, message, a reference photo and a deposit, with a cut-off you set per type of cake. And last the bake sheet: what's ordered goes to the night's bake per product and per weight, with what you bake for the shelves on top.

For some bakers that's an ordering module on the site they already have, for others a full online shop with local delivery. What that shop needs page by page, and what the law asks of it, is on bakery website design. How we build online shops in general is under webshop development.

For a UK bakery, allergens aren't a poster by the till. Since 1 October 2021, food that is prepacked for direct sale, PPDS, carries a label in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with the name of the food and a full ingredients list, with the 14 allergens emphasised. The Food Standards Agency names bakery products packed on site before the customer selects them as an example. The sandwich in the chiller and the boxed brownies count; the loaf you bag at the counter after the customer asks for it does not.

That's why we tie allergens to the recipe, not to a label template. Swap the flour or the chocolate and every product that uses it changes with it: the label, the product page and the screen at the counter. For loose food you can give allergen information another way, including orally, as long as customers can get it.

Batch numbers work the same way. You keep records of who supplied you and of every business you supply, so a café or a school that buys your bread is in your records too. Scan the sack when it arrives and when it's opened, and the batch hangs on that night's bake. Stock per place, dry store, walk-in and shop, with an alert before the flour runs out, is what we build as inventory management software.

People rarely search for a bakery by name. They type 'birthday cake Frome', 'sourdough near me' or 'bakery open Sunday'. The bakery with a page for each of those, showing the cakes you actually make, the towns you deliver to and a button to order, gets the customer. How we work on local search is under local SEO.

The Google profile matters as much. A bakery lives on the question 'are they open now', so bank holiday hours and your summer break must be right. A photo of the counter on Saturday morning does more than a logo. Setting the profile up is covered in create a Google Business Profile; asking for reviews without begging, in get more Google reviews. A bakery site starts from 1,500 euros.

A bakery grows as fast as it finds a baker who wants to work nights. That person isn't scrolling a job board full of office roles; they look at bakeries nearby and ask around. An application that wants a CV as a Word file loses them. So we put the vacancy on your own site, with the real hours in plain sight, and three questions that matter: name and number, experience with bread, pastry or both, and when you can call. What you show the people who might work for you is called employer branding. Who then works which night, which bench and which Saturday, you plan with staff scheduling software that knows who runs the oven and who is the Saturday helper.

Some orders will always come by email or message: a party with a cake, rolls and sandwiches, a school that wants bread every Friday. AI can read that message and turn it into a draft order with the collection time and the quantities. It lays the order next to your recipes and notices the cake asked for contains nuts while the customer mentions a nut allergy.

What AI does not do is confirm an order on its own or declare anything free from an allergen. The baker reads it and decides, because only the baker knows whether nuts are handled on the same bench. How we build such an assistant is under AI automation. A sole trader who wants to see what AI can do before anything gets built can start with AI for sole traders.

A baker on the bench with a partner on the counter doesn't need an ERP. A bakery with a central bakehouse and five shops needs more than an order book. This is what we would build at each size, next to the till.

What drives the cost of such a build is set out in custom software development cost. A bakery that also caters will find the rest under software for caterers; the butcher down the road reads butcher shop software.

These are the rules that most often need to live in the software. They apply to England unless the table says otherwise.

Who has to register, when and with which council is set out in register a food business. The software decides nothing for you. It makes sure you see the rule at the moment it counts. A bakery selling across the Channel also deals with EU rules; what changes is in selling to the EU from the UK.

The 70 minutes are the orders that still come by phone, plus checking what came in online. The difference is 275 minutes, just over four and a half hours a week. Over 48 working weeks that's 220 hours, more than five weeks of a full-time baker. The forgotten cake on a Saturday morning isn't in these numbers at all.

We haven't had a bakery as a client yet; booking a free slot from a calendar that shows what's still open is what we built for Villa Lidia, with a booking form and a small admin page for the owner.