Forty loaves out of the oven. Where did they all go?

How a bakery’s day goes

The oven’s on long before anybody else is awake. The first batch is out before light, and by seven there’s a queue: bread for the house, rock buns for school, meat pies for the office. Some people collect the same thing every morning and settle at the end of the week. If you supply sellers, they take bread in the morning and pay when it’s sold. By ten the rush is over, and what’s left on the shelf is the day’s question.

Because a bakery counts in two directions. You know what came out of the oven. You know what’s in the drawer and on your MoMo. The gap between the two is where things quietly go wrong: loaves given to family, a tray that went stale, bread taken on credit that nobody wrote down.

Every loaf, one tap

Each bread is a square on the till with its name, and a tap adds it to the sale. No prices to remember and no sums in the head, even with the queue out of the door. One bread can be sold more than one way, each at its own price, so sugar bread can be Small or Big on the same tile.

Every sale gets an order number, counted per day. If a customer wants a receipt, it’s a picture you send to their WhatsApp, with your bakery’s name and number on it.

The book of who owes

The customer book is on every plan. Each regular goes in with their name and number, and whatever they take on credit goes on a tab under that name. The book shows what each person owes right now, what they’ve spent and when they were last in. When they pay, it comes off.

So whoever collects two tea breads every morning and pays on Saturday is a name in the book, not a line in an exercise book only one person can read. The same goes for the sellers who take bread in the morning and settle in the evening.

An order placed ahead, a birthday cake or thirty meat pies for a funeral, can be rung up when it’s ordered, marked Pickup and set aside. It waits in your tabs until they come for it.

Counting what came out of the oven

On Pro, stock counts bread the way you do, by the loaf or the piece. When a batch comes out, count the shelf, and that sets the figure. Every loaf rung up comes off by itself. At closing, count again. Tabworthy already knows how many there should be, so the difference is what left without a sale.

Stale bread, a burnt tray, a loaf for the house: write it off as spoiled or given away, and it stops being a mystery. Whatever’s still missing after that is the number worth asking about.

Flour can be a supply, something you use up but never sell. Each bread can draw on one supply, so as loaves sell, the flour count goes down with them, and you see what should be left without weighing the bags.

A day that starts before dawn

Your business day starts at the hour you set. Set it to midnight and the bread sold at half five counts as today, not yesterday. The report has the day: what came in, cash against MoMo, what’s still owed on tabs, and which breads sold most. The Free plan keeps this week and last week, and Pro keeps any period you ask for.

If you’re just starting

Tabworthy is the till, not the business plan. If you’re still deciding what to bake and what to charge, starting a food business walks through the decisions, and food cost per plate shows how to work out what each item costs you to make.

What it doesn’t do yet

It doesn’t keep a diary of cake orders by date, track expiry dates or batches, or cost out a recipe, because a bread draws on one supply, not a list of ingredients. It doesn’t print labels or receipts, scan barcodes, or keep your suppliers and flour orders. And it doesn’t take orders online.