7 Essential Elements of a Bakery Management System

Your delicious goods are baked to perfection, and they deserve a bakery management system to support them. A custom point of sale system will help you boost sales by delivering that perfect customer experience.

Not only will your customers keep coming back; they'll also bring people along with them.

Introduction

There are many elements in a bakery that require keen attention. However, they can be missed while the owner or employees are handling the business. A bakery management system helps to take care of certain tasks to free up workers.

A bakery POS can help seamlessly organize delivery, takeaways, inventory management, and the ordering process.

Essential Features of a Bakery Management System

The ideal bakery point of sale system will be robust and efficiently handle all of your bakery operations, from inventory to online orders.

1. Mobile POS

You don't want to lose business because the wait is too long.

Your mobile bakery POS should get your customers through the line as quickly as possible. This is critical at peak times such as the early morning, when your bakery is packed.

Rather than having a cash register for sales, you can use a mobile POS, which would allow you to complete sales on a tablet or other mobile device while moving around.

For example, if your customer wants a Danish pastry from the other end of the bakery, you can process the payment from right where you are rather than maneuvering through a crowd and bumping into things on the way.

You can also get away from the counter and mingle with customers on the sales floor, which would make it easier to recommend and upsell various products.

2. Advanced Booking Module

An advanced booking module is an important feature of your POS software.

To carry out timely deliveries, you need to be aware of your orders well in advance. A bakery POS will empower you to accept orders in advance, and free you from the trouble of maintaining an order sheet. It will also allow you to set alerts and reminders for deliveries.

3. Ingredient/Inventory Management

Running out of ingredients is not something you want to allow.

Little will be more off-putting to your customer than waiting in line or visiting for a particular item only to find that the required ingredients haven't even arrived yet.

With a bakery management system, you'll be able to track ingredients. Items can be added to a database along with cost, measurement, vendor information, and so on. This is also handy for bakeries that do a lot of custom orders.

You can add in the volume of ingredients that every item uses. Hence, as your baked goods sell, your ingredients stock adjusts.

Another critical point: with inventory management (which can also be done with process automation), perishable items will more likely be consumed before the expiry date and not wasted. This leads to better shelf-life management and customer experience.

4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Which brands get the most loyalty? The ones that craft a good relationship with their customers.

This can be more difficult to manage than you expect, since delivering a personalized and cohesive experience is no easy feat.

CRM integration will capture your customer data from various sources and update it in a central location. With this, you can recognize your customers' eating habits, run better loyalty programs, and market or send greetings to them when a birthday or anniversary is coming up. (Pro tip: Offer them discounts on their special days.)

It's not just about greeting them by name when they walk in (although that is a big bonus for your customer). With customer profiles, you'll get an understanding of who your customer is and what they want from you.

Customer profiles can include basic information such as email addresses, but also insights about what they buy, where and when they shop, and more.

With a CRM, you can also track trends that allow you to anticipate high traffic periods or products that appeal to certain demographics.

5. Order Management

Order management will make order tracking more efficient, so that you won't write the wrong name on the cake or lose an order.

Ideally, the POS software will present orders in an all-in-one view. This will allow you to scroll through past and current orders. This cuts down confusion and delays. Furthermore, with your complete history of orders, you'll know which items are most popular during certain periods, your most popular channels, and more.

All this helps you to plan ahead of time and develop better marketing.

Additionally, your customers will enjoy your order management, since they'll be able to track, change, or cancel their orders more easily.

6. Detailed Reporting

With detailed reporting, you'll know where your money is being invested and used and whether you are getting the best results. Essentially, you'll get a panoramic view of your business.

A bakery management system's daily, hourly, monthly and yearly reports will help you carry out a more in-depth analysis of your raw materials and sales.

Some of the reports you'll be able to check include:

• Sales reports

• Serial item reports/inventory aging reports

• Tax reports

• Tips reports

• Time clock reports

• Inventory reports

7. Central Kitchen Management

With central kitchen management, it will be easier to handle many orders across various outlets at the same time. You'll be able to easily view all the delivered, wasted and baked items. Managing receipts will also become more streamlined since the list of bills is available centrally.

Conclusion

With F&B services adopting the latest technologies, bakery businesses may fall behind if they don't jump on the bandwagon too.

With such intense competition, using software product development to get a bakery management system will give you an edge. Luckily for you, BluEnt is just a click away.

We are a software development company that serves Fortune companies and SMEs. If you want to see how we've served other businesses, go here.

Ready to make your bakery business an even greater success with software development services? Contact us now!

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