Bakery Bookkeeping: Cash, Waste and Flour Costs

You put the first tray in at four. By half past six the counter is open, and by nine you have taken cash, taken card, handed forty rolls to the cafe down the road on account, and set aside two trays that will not sell. At two in the afternoon you are tired, the till has money in it, and you could not honestly say whether the day made anything. That is the real bakery bookkeeping problem. It is not that the maths is hard. It is that the money moves early, in small amounts, in three directions at once, and nobody has time to write it down while it is happening.

A bakery differs from most small shops in one specific way: you produce before you know what you will sell. The bread that came out at five is already a cost by lunchtime, whether it goes into a bag or into a bin. So daily takings on their own tell you very little. What you need, every day, is three things: what came in, what it cost to bake, and what did not sell. Once those three sit next to each other, the month stops being a guess and starts being a decision.

The five numbers that actually decide your month

• The opening float, meaning the money you put in the till before trading starts, which is not income and should never be counted as such.
• Counter takings split into cash and card, because card money reaches your bank a day or more later and slightly lighter after fees.
• Wholesale deliveries to cafes, restaurants and offices, which are sales you have already made but have not yet been paid for.
• Ingredient deliveries, particularly flour, butter and eggs, where the price per sack or per block moves more than most bakers track.
• Waste and end-of-day markdowns, which are the quietest cost in the business because nothing leaves your bank account when they happen.

Deal with the float first, because it causes more confusion than anything else. Decide on a fixed amount that sits in the till before trading and use the same figure every single day. Write it down once. At closing, count the drawer, remove that fixed amount, and whatever remains is the day's cash taking. If the float drifts because someone needed change overnight, note it. A float that changes silently is the most common reason a bakery's cash never quite adds up.

Log takings at the end of each shift, not at the end of the week. By Friday nobody remembers Tuesday. Record two figures: cash counted, and the card terminal's own end-of-day total. Keep them on separate lines. Your bank statement will show card money arriving later and net of fees, and if you have merged the two you will spend an evening trying to work out why nothing matches. Two lines a day removes that problem entirely.

Then write down waste, even roughly. You do not need a costing system for this. "Waste: nine loaves, fourteen pastries" at closing is enough, as long as you write it every day. After three or four weeks you will see the pattern, usually a particular product on a particular weekday, and the fix is almost always to bake less rather than to sell harder. Waste recorded as a feeling changes nothing. Waste recorded as a number changes your production plan.

A closing routine that takes about five minutes

• Count the drawer, remove the fixed float, and write the cash figure down before you do anything else.
• Pull the card terminal's end-of-day total and record it as its own separate line.
• Note any bread that left the shop on account, with the customer name and the amount owed.
• Write today's waste as a simple count of items rather than a value.
• Add any cash you paid out during the day, including the emergency yeast run and the delivery driver.
• Note anything unusual in one short sentence, because context you remember today is context you will not remember in March.

Here is an invented example, purely to show the shape of it. A Tuesday: cash counted after removing the float, 310. Card terminal total, 585. Bread delivered on account to two cafes, 240, unpaid. Flour delivery paid on the day, 180. Waste, eleven loaves and nine pastries. So the day looks like 895 collected, 240 still owed to you, 180 gone out and a visible amount of stock lost. Those figures are made up, but the layout is the point: money in, money owed, money out and stock lost, one line each.

Keep wholesale and counter money in separate columns from the start, because they behave differently. Counter money is settled the moment it is handed over. Wholesale is a promise: bread delivered on Monday, invoiced at month end, paid whenever the cafe's own week has been kind. If both sit inside one figure called "sales" you will feel richer than you are. A simple owed-to-me list, with customer, date, amount and whether it is paid, is usually the difference between chasing politely on the fifth of the month and discovering in July that somebody stopped paying in April.

Ingredient prices are the other thing worth tracking, because they move without announcing themselves. Write the price per sack of flour and per block of butter on every delivery, with the date. That is the whole task. Once a month, read down the column. If the sack has climbed and your loaf price has not moved in a year, you now have evidence instead of a suspicion, and you can decide whether to change the price, the dough weight, or nothing at all. Bakers who track this tend to adjust in small steps. Bakers who do not tend to adjust in one painful jump.