Bake from recipes, sell by piece or weight, write off what is left

A sweet shop can sell more in the week before Diwali than in an ordinary month, and Raksha Bandhan, Holi, weddings and office orders bring peaks of their own. A bakery's peaks are daily as well as seasonal: the morning bread rush, the evening snack crowd and weekend cake orders.

For festival weeks, plan runs a few days ahead with a due date, so ingredients such as khoya, ghee and dry fruits show as short while there is still time to buy, and Purchase missing materials drafts the orders to your suppliers. Office orders for gift boxes become sales orders: the draft prints as a quotation, the confirmed order can take an advance, and the invoice carries the company's GSTIN.

For the daily rhythm, the dashboard's busiest hours chart shows when the counter is busiest by weekday and hour, which helps decide when to bake a second batch or add a person at the counter. The counter's popular tiles keep the 12 products sold most in the last 30 days one tap away.

Every food business in India needs an FSSAI registration or licence, depending on its size and activity. Packaged items, such as boxed sweets, cookies and rusks, also fall under FSSAI's labelling rules, which ask for a batch, lot or code number and the date of manufacture or packing with the expiry or use-by date, under regulations 5(9) and 5(10) of the Labelling and Display Regulations, 2020, with some exceptions. For loose sweets on trays, check FSSAI's current direction on date display.

managemate keeps the record behind those labels. Each completed run is a batch with its number, expiry date and the ingredient lots it used, and its production sheet prints as the batch record. Lot QR labels and product labels do not print dates, so print those with your pack labels as you do today.

Two tax points are worth checking with your accountant. Bakery and sweet items do not all share one GST rate, so set the rate and HSN code on each product from the current CBIC schedule. And a shop under the composition scheme issues a bill of supply rather than a tax invoice, which managemate does not print.

Milk, paneer and cream often arrive every morning on a weekly account with the dairy, while flour, sugar and ghee come by the sack or tin every week or two. Record the dairy's daily deliveries as part receipts on one purchase order for the week, so the supplier's weekly bill can be checked against what arrived.

Each morning's runs use ingredients earliest expiry first and put trays into stock with their cost per piece or kilogram. If you bake centrally, transfers move trays to each outlet with their lot and expiry, and each outlet's counter sells from its own stock. Day end, for one outlet or all of them, totals cash, UPI and card.

What does not sell becomes a write-off the next morning, valued at cost. Reports then shows sales, cost of sales, gross margin and stock written off for the period, so you can see whether a product earns its place in the display case once its wastage is counted.

Write each recipe for the batch you actually make, such as one tray of 24 pastries or a 10 kg pan of barfi, with ingredients in the units the kitchen weighs. Add a usage pack such as gram to ingredients stocked in kilograms, so the recipe reads 750 g of butter while stock stays in kg.

Give products short categories, such as Breads, Cakes, Sweets and Namkeen, because they become counter tiles. If your prices include GST, turn on Selling prices include GST. Add selling packs for boxes, such as 250 g and 500 g, and the counter prices them from the per-kilogram price.

In the first week, start with the ten products you make every day: write their recipes, record a run for each every morning and write off what is left. Add the rest once the routine holds. Bought-in items, such as packaged biscuits and drinks, are simple purchases with no recipe.