How do you plan a week of baking? Inside the Bake Boost production planner

Short answer: click Production in the sidebar and pick a week. Bake Boost reads every confirmed order due in those seven days, gathers the same item across different orders onto one line, and lays the result out day by day. There is nothing to type in. Quotes and cancelled orders are left out automatically, and a prep timeline can work backwards from each delivery date to tell you what has to be started today.

This is post three in the series on what Bake Boost does for you day to day. Post one covered the AI Pricing Advisor and post two the AI product-description writer. Those two help you win the order. This one is about actually making it.

The quick facts

Why the morning whiteboard costs you money

Most small bakeries plan the same way: open the orders, read them one at a time, and write a list on a whiteboard. It works. It also has two expensive habits baked into it.

The first is re-reading. Every morning you go back through the same orders to rebuild a list you already built yesterday, and the list is only ever as good as your concentration at 6am.

The second is worse, and quieter. Eight orders this Saturday all want a vanilla sponge. Read order by order, that is eight separate jobs. Read all at once, it is one mix. Nothing on a handwritten list tells you that, so the sponge gets made eight times — eight warm-ups, eight bowls, eight lots of washing up — for the same number of cakes.

A bake sheet that is built from the orders instead of from memory fixes both.

How does the production planner build the week?

Click Production and you land on the current week, Monday to Sunday. Use the arrows to move between weeks, or This week to jump back.

Each day is a card holding everything due that day. The list is built from your real orders — quotes you have sent but nobody has accepted, and orders that were cancelled, are left out on their own. Change an order and the sheet changes with it; there is no separate plan to keep in step.

On every line you get a tick box to mark it done, a station tag (Bake, Decorate, Pack or Prep) so a busy day can be split by task, a priority, and two small boxes: Est and Actual minutes. If you run a team, you can also put a name against a line.

What is a batch, and why does it matter?

The default Batches view is the bake sheet, and the word is doing real work there.

Out of the box, each line shows the total quantity across every order for that day. Tell Bake Boost how many one batch of something makes — Batch sizes at the top of the page — and the line changes to show batches to mix instead. Six vanilla sponges across four orders, with a batch that makes two, becomes "4 batches · 6 units" on one line rather than four jobs on four lines.

The sum includes a small waste buffer, 5% by default, so you make a little extra to cover the reject that always turns up. Fifty-four cupcakes with a batch that yields twenty works out as 54 × 1.05 ÷ 20, rounded up: three batches.

While you are in Batch sizes you can also give an item its prep and bake minutes, and how much oven space one batch takes. Both are optional. Fill in the minutes and the Est figure on every line fills itself in from then on.

Bake sheet, or pack list?

A kitchen needs the day grouped by recipe. A packing table needs exactly the opposite. So the same day is available both ways.

Switch to Pack list and pick a day, and the week flips around: one card per order, with the customer, the order number, the collection or delivery time, and the items that belong to them.

Bake from Batches, pack from Pack list. Same orders, no second list to maintain, and nobody has to reverse-engineer whose cupcakes are whose at seven in the morning.

There is a third view, Items, for when you want the week as a plain checklist: every ordered line on its own row with the date, order number, quantity, customer and whether it goes out for delivery or collection. Filter it by date range, product type or fulfilment, search an order number, and tick things off as Made.

What do I have to start today?

This is the question a weekly list cannot answer on its own, and it is where most late nights come from.

A sourdough due Saturday morning is not Saturday's work. The levain goes on Friday morning, the bulk ferment runs Friday afternoon, shaping and the cold proof take Friday night, and only the bake is Saturday. "Make sourdough Saturday" is already too late by the time you read it.

Expand a batch and press Generate, and the planner walks that product's stages backwards from the order's delivery date, putting each step on the day and the rough time it has to happen.

You describe each product's chain once — Mix, Bulk ferment, Shape, Proof, Bake, Cool, Decorate, Pack, or whatever yours really is. Each step carries three numbers: hands-on minutes (the active work), passive hours (the proving and cooling, when nobody is working but the clock is), and any gap before the next step starts. If you want a head start, Add starter chain drops in a typical prep → bake → cool → decorate → pack set for you to edit.

Two details matter more than they sound:

• A step that lands on a day you are closed is moved earlier, to your nearest open day, and flagged as shifted. Your customer's delivery date never moves — only the prep does.
• Your edits stick. Nudge a step and it is marked as edited. If the delivery date changes later and you regenerate, the rest recomputes and your hand-tuned step stays where you put it.

The timeline is per product and set up once. Do your slowest, multi-day bakes first — those are the ones where starting late actually hurts.

Will it warn me before a Saturday goes wrong?

A day can look perfectly reasonable in a list and be impossible in a kitchen.

Under Capacity you can set two ceilings: labour hours per day and oven loads per day. When the estimated minutes on a day add up past your labour limit, or the batches need more oven space than you have, that day gets an over-capacity flag — the red 9h labor badge on the Saturday in the first screenshot above.

It is a warning, never a block. Nothing stops you taking the order; you just find out on Tuesday instead of on the day. Leave a limit blank and that warning stays off.

The Actual minutes box is the long game here. Note the real time on a few items a week and you slowly build a record of what genuinely takes longest — which is the same number you should be using when you price the work.

What it will not do

Being straight about the edges:

• It does not reschedule anything. The capacity flag warns; it never moves an order or solves your week for you.
• It does not run a timer. Estimated and actual minutes are typed in by you.
• Items you add by hand do not get a prep timeline. The + button on any day adds your own jobs — batch prep, stock for the counter, a delivery run — but with no delivery date to work back from there is nothing to schedule backwards.
• A product with no stages simply shows no timeline. Nothing else changes, and nothing breaks.
• Start times are a guide, not an alarm. They are rough blocks to plan around.

Who can use it, and what does it cost?

Production planning, including the prep timeline and the Items checklist, is part of the Pro plan. There is no per-use cost and no credits involved — it reads orders you already have.

If you are on a lower plan you will be invited to upgrade when you open the page. The full breakdown is on the plans page, and the step-by-step guide lives in the Production planning docs.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to set anything up before the production planner is useful?
No. Open it and the week is already built from your orders. Batch sizes, times and capacity limits are all optional refinements you can add later.

Which orders appear on the bake sheet?
Confirmed, bakeable orders due in the week you are looking at. Quotes that nobody has accepted and cancelled orders are left out.

Does it group the same cake from different orders?
Yes — that is the point. Every order's items are gathered up and the same item becomes a single line with the total to make, so you mix each recipe once.

How does Bake Boost work out the number of batches?
Total units needed, plus a waste buffer (5% by default, and you can change it), divided by the batch size you set for that item, rounded up. With no batch size set, the line simply shows the total quantity.

Can the planner tell me what to start today for an order due on Saturday?
Yes. Give the product its stages once and the prep timeline works backwards from the delivery date, so Thursday's board tells you to start Saturday's levain.

What happens if a prep step lands on a day I am closed?
It is moved earlier to your nearest open day and flagged as shifted. The customer's delivery date is never changed.

Which Bake Boost plan includes production planning?
Pro. The bake sheet, pack list, Items checklist, capacity warnings and prep timeline are all included, with no per-use cost.

Next in this series

Tomorrow we look at how Bake Boost keeps an eye on your ingredients and supplies, and tells you what is about to run out. If you want the whole picture now, see what you get with Bake Boost or why it is built for bakers.