Cybake improves order processing, accounts and invoicing at Italian Bakery
When Antonio and Aurora Frattin emigrated from Italy to the city of Edmonton, Alberta, they found that the bread on offer locally was not to their liking.
In response, the couple started baking traditional Italian loaves at home and selling them door to door. In 1960, they opened their first Italian Bakery store.
Famed for its doughnuts as well as its bread, Italian Bakery continues to be run by the Frattin family. They operate a retail store in the Edmonton suburb of Beverly and a grocery/café called Italian Bakery’s Mercarto, in the adjoining city of Saint Albert.
As well as supplying the bread to Italian Bakery’s Mercarto, the business has built up a large wholesale customer base of restaurants, cafes, retailers, and sandwich-makers.
Before moving to Cybake in 2023, the company used an old bakery management software system created by a local developer that had started to crash frequently and had little support.
Ida Miccolis, responsible for Italian Bakery’s accounts payable and special projects, was given the job of looking for a new bakery ERP system.
The first alternative she looked at didn’t generate either the production or pack sheets the business required.
Ida says: “We needed to have both for the way things are done here. Then, just looking into Cybake, I just kept saying, ‘No, this one’s way better. It has way more options, way more things for us to do’.”
An ex-network admin for the Alberta government, she also noted that Cybake’s developers invited suggestions from users about enhancements to the software.
Integration
Highlighting improvements Cybake has made to Italian Baker’s processes, Ida points to its integration with QuickBooks, which has made invoicing and accounts payable more efficient.
“Once you have everything in one system, it’s much easier to manage instead of trying to get information out of two different systems,” she explains.
Life is also now easier for the staff who take the bakery’s phone orders where misunderstandings were common.
Ida explains: “It’s much easier to do data entry in Cybake than our old system. We noticed after a month of using it, that it automatically populates the product that the restaurants use.
“We now know: ‘Oh, this restaurant always gets this raisin bread at three-quarter inch slice. So, even though I thought I heard ‘half inch,’ no, it’s three-quarter because that is what is showing up, and that is what they got every time before that. It has actually saved a lot of errors that way.”
Another Cybake feature that has impressed is the way it automates standing orders, which are an integral part of just about every baking business.
“The standing order system works really well,” she says. “I really like how we can see an entire week’s order for one customer. We couldn’t do that before. You had to individually go into each order.”
Additionally, Cybake’s flexibility means that it is now much easier for the bakery to allow for public holidays:
“This Monday is a Remembrance Day in Canada, so everybody’s off, and so we have to move all our Monday deliveries over to Tuesday. Before, it was a matter of deleting them and reentering them on the correct day. I like how, with Cybake, we can just move them. Nice. What we are finding is that there is so much less data entry work.”
Would Italian Bakery recommend Cybake to other bakeries.?
“Yes, for sure, says Ida. “It’s just much easier to keep track of all the products and all the customers. I like it for that.”
To find out how Cybake can improve your bakery’s processes, book a demo today!
Seamus Quinn is the head of communications for Cybake, Cybake USA and Cybake Australia.
