If you own a bakery, what’s your time worth?
I have worked in the baking industry for over twenty years, and I am still surprised at how much time bakery owners spend on repetitive tasks and calculations.
For example, I often talk to owners of retail chains whose time is taken up every day trying to work out how much fresh product they need to produce to send out to each of their stores.
Sometimes, they spend hours poring over historic sales data to come up with a number. Other times, they are reviewing their store managers’ orders and then making adjustments to them.
This is not limited to owners of smaller firms, by the way. It is not unusual to find a proprietor with many outlets and hundreds of employees checking the orders from all their stores every evening. They check if the orders seem accurate, nothing has been missed, and nothing has been ordered incorrectly.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Baking is vocational, the founders of bakeries are driven people, and their money is on the line on every day. It is no wonder that, over time, more and more judgements and calculations are held pretty much solely in their heads.
It is one reason they reach out to us. In my experience, retail bakery owners that install Cybake soon find that they can trust the system to accurately forecast what each of their shops will need each day and generate the prep sheets and reports for production, with little human oversight.
Complex spreadsheets
Whether they are retail or wholesale operations, bakeries that don’t use bakery management software usually rely on highly complex spreadsheets to help them to try to automate production.
It is common to find that only one person in the business has the knowledge to maintain these spreadsheets. It’s usually someone fairly senior, and often it is the bakery’s owner, who then ends up constantly fixing formula issues or sanity-checking data. Sound familiar?
Even running a simple production report can take hours with a spreadsheet. All the orders that come in through your various channels need to be consolidated into one simple report for your bakers.
If any last-minute adjustments are made, this adds an extra burden to whoever has to recalculate and redistribute the reports. I’ve seen time and time again simple typos cost bakeries hundreds of dollars, euros or pounds in either lost sales from under-production or wasted product through over-production.
These losses can quickly add up and lead to vanishing customers if bakeries can’t fulfil their orders.
From a finance perspective, if a bakery owner has no system in place, they face a huge task trying to understand basics like cost-price of products, margins, or profitability.
Crunching these numbers takes serious amounts of time, whereas a bakery management system like Cybake can show you all this data in seconds.
Invoicing and reports
Cybake also integrates with accounts software such as Business Central, QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, or Xledger. It shares the kind of detailed data with them that accountants love and takes over the task of generating both sales and purchase invoices.
Rather than invoicing through their accounts software, many of our users find the additional reporting available when invoicing through Cybake to give them a far more robust basis for making business-critical decisions.
Cybake shows them direct customer and product profitability at invoiced values. It also gives them analysis that breaks down direct costs into raw materials, labor and overheads. Plus, it provides invoiced sales trend analysis to identify which customers are growing, which need chasing to keep ordering, and more.
Another advantage is detailed purchasing analysis – which really helps with supplier contract negotiations – as well as reports on supplier service levels and the monitoring of cost price fluctuations. All of which saves bakery owners and their managers huge amounts of effort.
So, if you own a bakery, what is your time actually worth?
My guess is that you are the most valuable resource in your business. Would it benefit your operation if you were liberated from these kinds of tasks? And how much would it benefit you?
If you would like to talk about how bakery management software can make life much easier in your business, please get in touch.
Rachel Hindle is the Global Sales & Marketing Manager of Cybake.
