Bakery Software Is $89+/mo. Batch Yield Is an Excel Tab.

What a small bakery actually needs to track

Strip out the marketing copy from bakery software vendors. The numbers that move a bakery operator's bottom line are three:

1. Batch yield and per-unit cost. A 24-piece croissant batch with $18 in flour-butter-egg input has a theoretical $0.75 cost per croissant. When sold at $4.50, that's an 83% margin on the bake itself. Knowing per-unit cost by product lets you reprice when butter spikes 22% in a quarter.
2. Preorder vs walk-in mix. Preorders are guaranteed cash with zero waste. Walk-ins are higher-margin (no discount) with real waste risk. Knowing the ratio per product tells you how much to bake on Saturday vs Tuesday.
3. End-of-day waste percentage. Industry baseline is 6–10% of daily production. Anything above 12% means production is over-forecasting demand — and that's a recoverable margin leak of $200+ per week for a $1.5K/day bakery.

None of those need a $89/month subscription. They need a workbook with cell references.

The Excel workbook for bakery economics

The gridmoo Bakery Batch Yield Planner ($7 once) handles the per-batch math:

• Recipe Card per product: ingredients, weights, yield, and computed per-unit cost.
• Daily Bake Plan — input expected sales by product; the workbook computes ingredients needed, total cost, and theoretical revenue.
• Per-Product Margin Dashboard — sorted by hourly profit (price × volume ÷ bake time). The brioche that takes 4 hours of proof time and sells 8/day looks profitable on price alone — until you see it's a labor sink compared to the muffin that nets $80/hour.
• Ingredient Cost Tracker — flour, butter, sugar, etc. with weighted-average cost. Triggers re-pricing alerts when an input goes up >10%.

The Bakery Preorder & Waste Radar ($11) handles demand forecasting:

• Preorder log by product and pickup date.
• Walk-in sales log by daypart (morning rush, lunch, afternoon).
• Waste log — what you binned, why, and the dollar impact.
• Smart bake-quantity suggestions based on 4-week rolling average + preorder backlog. (Not predictive AI — just averages that beat operator intuition for a tired baker.)

The 5-year cost comparison

BakeSmart Standard: $89/month × 60 = $5,340. Cybake (more common in UK independents): ~$120/month × 60 = $7,200.

Excel stack: Batch Yield Planner $7 + Preorder Radar $11 = $18 once. Over 5 years: $18.

5-year savings: $5,322. That's roughly the cost of a Hobart Legacy mixer, or three months of a part-time baker's labor, or 6 months of front-of-house rent for a small storefront. Pure margin recovery.

The trade-offs

• No POS integration. BakeSmart connects to a POS for live sales. The workbook needs a weekly export pasted in. Single location: 10-min Monday task. Multi-location: friction.
• No supplier purchase orders. Some bakery systems generate POs automatically from forecasted demand. The workbook flags low ingredients; you call the supplier yourself. (Most independents already do this.)
• No customer-facing online ordering. Use Square or Shopify free tier for the storefront; the workbook tracks the back-of-house math.

For a 1-location independent bakery doing $300K–$1M annual revenue, the Excel stack is honest. For a wholesale-heavy operation with 5+ accounts and tight delivery routing, the dedicated software earns its bill.

The minimum viable test

Don't switch yet. Pick your 5 highest-volume products. Set up the Batch Yield Planner with just those 5 recipes. Track for two weeks. If the per-unit cost numbers match your gut sense (or correct your gut in a useful direction), expand to the full menu. If the dashboard reveals a product that's been quietly money-losing — that one insight alone pays for the workbook in week 1.