How to run a pastry shop: 10 areas you need to keep under control

Running a pastry shop means a few numbers and a steady routine

Most pastry shops do not fail because of bad baking, but because the owner does not see in time what is happening: a cake forgotten in a notebook, butter a third more expensive with an old price list, takings that have not covered costs for three weeks. Managing a small business does not require a board and twenty-page reports. It requires each of the ten areas below to have one place where it is recorded and one person who looks at it. We have run the PyziPyzi pastry shop in Kalisz, Poland since 2018, and we built this list from our own mistakes.

• one place for the data from each area, instead of notes, Messenger and three spreadsheets
• one person responsible for each area, even if it is still you
• a steady routine: what you check every day, once a week and once a month

1. Orders and deadlines

An order taken by phone, written on a scrap of paper and then copied into a notebook gives you three chances to make a mistake. Rule one: every order goes into one place straight away, with the pickup date and time, the customer's contact, the deposit and a description. Rule two: the team sees the plan for the day without asking the owner. In BakePilot an order has a status (Draft, Confirmed, In production, Ready, Handed over), a deposit and attachments, and the calendar shows pickups by day, week and month; you can also connect it to the calendar on your phone via iCal. How an order moves through production is described in Production workflow.

• every day: the list of pickups for tomorrow and the day after
• with every order: deposit, contact, a photo or description of the decoration
• before the season: a daily order limit agreed with the production team

2. The cost of every product

Without the cost of a product there is no talking about making money. The cost is the sum of the recipe's ingredients at current prices, plus packaging, energy and labor. The most common mistake is a recipe costed once, two years ago, when butter cost something else. We go through it step by step, with an example, in How to calculate the real food cost of a cake. In BakePilot a recipe calculates its cost from the current prices in the ingredient database, and after prices change the “Recalculate all” button updates the costs of recipes and products at once (cost calculator, Profesjonalny (Professional) plan).

• cost calculated from the recipe, not “by eye”
• ingredient prices updated after every invoice that brings a change
• sub-recipes (creams, sponges) as separate recipes, so their cost is not counted twice

3. Prices and margin

A price is a decision, not the result of a calculator. The calculator tells you the amount below which you lose money on a product; you set the rest based on the market, your position and how much you want to earn. It is worth distinguishing margin (calculated from the selling price) from markup (calculated from cost), because confusing them gives the illusion of higher profit. We describe practical pricing methods in Bakery pricing.

• once a quarter: review the prices of products whose cost has grown the most
• separate prices for wholesale customers, not a discount “from your head” on every invoice
• a list of the products with the lowest margin: candidates for a price rise or a recipe change

4. Ingredients, purchasing and inventory

Running out of cream on Friday afternoon and finding three expired cartons of mascarpone on Monday are the same problem: nobody knows how much of what there is. It is enough to set a minimum for a dozen or so key ingredients and check them before ordering from the supplier. In BakePilot stock levels mark items below the minimum as “Low stock”, and the purchase planner puts together the list to order (Profesjonalny plan). Dated stocktaking and expiry dates are in the Mistrzowski (Master) plan. We collected ideas for cutting waste in 10 ways to cut ingredient waste.

• a minimum for the ingredients production cannot run without
• purchasing from a list, not from memory
• once a month: a stocktake and a comparison with what should be left

5. Production and the daily plan

Organizing work in a pastry shop starts the day before: what has to be baked tomorrow, what to prepare today (sponges, creams, yeast doughs), who is responsible for what. A board with order cards or a production list on the wall works better than asking “what are we making today?”. In BakePilot orders are arranged on a Kanban board, and production from a recipe guides you through weighing stage by stage (the production list and production from a recipe are in the Mistrzowski plan).

• tomorrow's plan ready before the end of today's shift
• recipes available to the team, not only in the owner's head
• for large orders: converting the recipe to the number of trays or pieces

6. Team, schedule and working time

Under Polish law, an employer keeps records of each employee's working time in order to calculate pay correctly (Article 149 § 1 of the Polish Labor Code).^[1] In a pastry shop there are also early shifts, weekends in the First Communion season and summer holidays. A schedule set in advance and clear responsibilities save more nerves than any app. In BakePilot every employee has a role (Salesperson, Baker, Warehouse worker, Purchaser, Accountant) with permissions set for your company, and the Time tracking module (Mistrzowski plan) has PIN clock-in on a shared tablet, a shift schedule, leave and hours settlement. We write about planning the summer in The summer production schedule.

• next week's schedule known by Thursday at the latest
• everyone knows what they must not touch (finances, prices, deleting orders)
• working time records kept up to date, not reconstructed at payday^[1]

7. Takings day by day

One number worth knowing every evening: how much was in the till and whether it matches what is in the drawer and on the card terminal. A daily report (till, terminal, number of customers, average basket, discrepancy) lets you see after a month which days of the week really make money, and after a year compare seasons. In BakePilot the daily report can be filled in by the employee closing the shift, and sales analytics show revenue, products and days of the week (Profesjonalny plan).

• every day: the till report and cash reconciliation
• every week: a comparison with the same week a month or a year earlier
• every month: the best- and worst-selling products

8. Break-even point and money for taxes

The break-even point is the daily takings at which you break even: fixed costs (rent, utilities, accounting) and labor costs divided by the margin after ingredients. Knowing it, you can tell in the evening whether the day paid for itself. The second number is the VAT you need to set aside before you pay it on time. In BakePilot the Finance module (Mistrzowski plan) calculates the break-even point from cost invoices, daily reports and time tracking settlements, and a VAT estimate for the period. These are numbers for planning, not a tax return, the settlement stays with your accountant.

• the daily break-even point written down where you close the till
• costs assigned to categories, otherwise the break-even point comes out too low
• every month: the VAT amount set aside in a separate account

9. Sanepid and HACCP

Under Polish law, everyone working with food needs a medical certificate for sanitary and epidemiological purposes, and hygiene training must be documented (Article 59 of the Polish act on food and nutrition safety).^[2] On top of that come daily temperature records, a cleaning schedule and an allergen procedure. What exactly a small pastry shop must have is described in HACCP in a small pastry shop without the paperwork, in the context of Sanepid, the Polish sanitary inspection. In BakePilot temperature records, control forms and GHP/GMP procedures are in the HACCP module (Mistrzowski plan).

• every day: fridge temperatures, with a corrective action when a limit is exceeded
• up-to-date medical certificates and training for every employee^[2]
• allergens calculated from the recipe, not from memory

10. Invoices and KSeF

From 2026, invoices for businesses in Poland go through KSeF, Poland's National e-Invoicing System, and receiving invoices from suppliers in KSeF has been mandatory since February 1, 2026.^[3] For a pastry shop this means two things: issuing invoices to business customers (cafes, shops, companies ordering catering) and purchase invoices from wholesalers, which already arrive in KSeF. What is changing and how long the exceptions last is described in KSeF for Polish pastry shops and bakeries.

• sales invoices issued from one place, with customer details entered once
• purchase invoices downloaded from KSeF, not retyped from paper
• every month: a summary for your accountant

The owner's routine: day, week, month

Ten areas sound like a lot, but most of them need a few minutes at a fixed moment. Below is the routine that works for us. You do not have to adopt it all at once. It is better to start with orders and product costs, because that is where most money slips away.

Notebook, Excel or software?

Each of these tools works as long as one person looks after it. A notebook is the fastest, but it does not recalculate costs and it will not show the team the plan when the owner is away. Excel calculates, but the orders sheet, the recipes sheet and the takings sheet know nothing about each other, and the version on the sales assistant's phone is rarely up to date. Software makes sense when it connects the areas: the order knows the recipe, the recipe knows the prices from invoices, and the takings go into the break-even point. That is how our bakery management software works, which we first built for ourselves. You can import data from Excel (ingredients, products, customers, daily reports), so you do not start from scratch.

It is not about having everything in an app. It is about knowing at ten in the evening whether today paid for itself, and making sure nobody has to call you tomorrow to ask what to bake.