Decision guide

Bakery production planning: when a spreadsheet stops being enough

Every bakery plans. The question is where the plan lives, and how many places have to agree before the mixer starts. A spreadsheet is the right answer for a surprisingly long time, and then, quite suddenly, it is not.

What planning actually consists of

Strip away the tools and a day’s production is three documents that must agree:

1. The bake list. Products and quantities for the day. It starts from a baseline, the pattern you bake on a normal Tuesday, and it absorbs changes: a wholesale customer’s standing order, a Saturday spike, a café that added a dozen buns, a counter order for a birthday.
2. The mixing sheet. Each dough in kilograms, with its ingredients, worked out from the bake list through the recipes’ percentages and each product’s division weight.
3. The stock position. What is in the store room, what the mixing sheet will consume this week, and when the next delivery arrives.

The baker’s morning is spent on the first two; the owner’s evening on the third. Trouble starts when a change to one document does not reach the others.

Where a spreadsheet works

A spreadsheet handles this well when:

• the product range is under about fifteen and the doughs under five;
• orders are few, mostly standing, and arrive by email or phone in time to be typed in;
• one person does the typing and the same person bakes;
• the week looks like last week.

Under those conditions a spreadsheet with a tab per day, formulas that turn units into kilograms, and a stock tab updated on Sunday is a complete system. Many good bakeries have run for years on exactly that, and nothing in this guide says they should stop.

The five signs it has stopped working

1. The pad. Orders taken at the counter or by phone go on a pad, and the pad gets typed in later, or not. At four in the morning the baker is counting loaves against a page that says “Anna, 2 loaves Sat, the seeded one?”. Every bakery has a version of this pad. Its cost is the loaf that was not baked and the one that was baked for nobody.

2. Two versions of the truth. The spreadsheet on the office computer says 40 country loaves; the printed sheet on the bench says 36 because someone changed it after printing. Or the reverse.

3. The mixing sheet is done by hand. Once products share doughs and doughs feed several products, the conversion from units to kilograms is real arithmetic. When it lives in someone’s head, it is right on the days that person is in.

4. Stock is a surprise. Flour runs out on a Saturday, or the seed mix does, and the discovery is made by the person reaching for it. The information to predict it existed, in the bake list and the recipes, but nothing joined them to the store room.

5. A second location, or a second shift. The moment two people plan the same production from two places, the spreadsheet becomes an email attachment, and attachments fork.

Two of these signs at once, most weeks, is the threshold. One of them is Tuesday.

What to look for instead

The decision is not “spreadsheet or software”. It is what the replacement has to do that the spreadsheet cannot. In rough order of value:

• Orders land on the bake list by themselves. Wholesale, counter and online orders should appear on the day they are for, next to the baseline, so the baker confirms rather than transcribes. This is the single change that kills the pad.
• The mixing sheet is derived, not written. Recipes in baker’s percentages, products with division weights, and a button that turns the confirmed bake list into kilograms per dough.
• Stock is forecast from the plan. The system knows what the week will consume and when suppliers deliver, and it says which ingredient runs out first and by which day the order must go in.
• One plan, many screens. The person at the counter, the baker and the owner all look at the same day.

Everything else, accounting, a till, a website, is a different purchase. Bakery management tools that try to be all of them tend to do the production part least well, because it is the part that requires knowing what a levain is.

Cost, honestly

A spreadsheet costs an hour or two a week and the occasional wrong bake. Software costs a subscription and a week of setting up recipes and products properly. The setup is the real price, and it is also the benefit: a bakery that writes down its formulas in percentages and its products with division weights has done most of the work of running well, whatever tool it uses afterwards.

If the range is small and the orders are standing, keep the spreadsheet and put the effort into the formulas. If the pad is full, the bake list and the mixing sheet disagree, and the flour ran out last month, the spreadsheet has finished its job.

Questions bakers ask

How do small bakeries plan production?

Most start with a baseline: the same products in the same quantities each weekday, adjusted from memory for the weather and the season. Orders from wholesale customers and the counter are added on top, usually on paper. The plan becomes a bake list, and the bake list becomes a mixing sheet by arithmetic.

What is a bake list?

The list of products and quantities to bake on a given day, by shift or oven load. It is the document everything else hangs from: the mixing sheet is derived from it, the shaping and proofing schedule follows it, and the shop counts against it.

What is the difference between a bake list and a mixing sheet?

The bake list is in products and units: 40 country loaves, 60 rolls. The mixing sheet is in doughs and kilograms: 52 kg of 75 percent white dough, 9 kg of rye. One product can draw on several doughs, and one dough serves several products.

Related

• Baker's percentages, explained simply. In baker's percentages, flour is always 100 and every other ingredient is a share of the flour. Water 70 means 700 g of water per kilo of flour, at any batch size.
• How much flour to order, and when. A bakery's weekly flour use follows from its bake list. Knowing the day the sack runs out, and the day to order by, turns a Saturday scramble into a Monday routine.
• How long to bulk ferment sourdough, and how to tell when it is done. Bulk fermentation is done when the dough has grown 30 to 75 percent, domes at the edges and jiggles as one mass. At 24 to 26 °C that takes four to six hours.

Sources: Gisslen, Professional Baking; Bread Bakers Guild of America, production planning resources; Own practice: a six-day sourdough microbakery in Helsinki. Updated 2026-09-09.