Wholesale Handler
Three or four cafes fit in a notebook
Most microbakeries start with one or two wholesale accounts and settle between three and five. At that size the same cafes take the same items on the same weekdays, and the whole book is a page of quantities that barely changes.
The volume is not what breaks the page. The exceptions are. One cafe wants fewer loaves this week, another wants extras for an event, a school account is closed for the week, and a change to a standing order arrives by message after the list has been written out. By the time the bake starts there are several versions of the same week in circulation: the standing arrangement, this week's page, the message thread, the written list, the delivery note, the invoice. Every change has to reach all of them.
How to stop taking bakery orders on WhatsApp covers moving the message thread off the phone.
The cutoff has to close before the mix, not before the delivery
The usual wholesale advice is a deadline 24 to 48 hours before delivery, which is anchored to the wrong event. An overnight bread schedule commits the quantity at the mix: dough mixed mid-afternoon, shaped in the evening, retarded overnight, oven on around four, out of the cooling rack and into the van for a cafe that opens at seven. Longest-proof items go first, so their numbers are fixed before the shorter ones are even scaled. An order that arrives at midnight is not late for the delivery. It is late for the dough.
So the deadline to state is not "the night before". It is whatever hour leaves you room to mix for that delivery day. In Wholesale Handler a cutoff sits on each delivery day and is set as a lead time before that day, so a Friday delivery can close Wednesday afternoon while a Tuesday delivery stays open until Monday night. A day cannot be accepted for delivery without one. A date that is closed tells the cafe which rule closed it, whether that is a non-delivery day, a closure, the cutoff having passed or a date too far ahead, alongside any line you write yourself.
How to set a wholesale bakery order cutoff works through choosing the hour.
Standing orders place themselves at the cutoff
A cafe taking the same order every weekday is a schedule, not a weekly conversation. Wholesale Handler holds it as one row per customer: a weekday, a cadence from weekly to four-weekly, and the lines.
The mechanic worth knowing is that no order exists until that day's cutoff. The order is written at the cutoff and every line is priced and checked then, against the catalogue as it stands, not as it stood when the schedule was saved. A product that is out of season that day is left off rather than baked into the total, and the cafe is emailed which line went and when it comes back. If the delivery would fall below your minimum spend, no order is created at all: the schedule stops with a Needs attention status naming both figures, and both sides are told it did not place.
The cafe gets a preview email three days out and can skip a single delivery from it without signing in. The schedule carries on.
Totalling the make list from the orders, not the schedules
The schedules are not the make list. Add up the standing arrangements and you bake for the cafe that is closed and the delivery that was skipped, and the difference lands as an overbake in the products you make most of, every week.
Wholesale Handler's production schedule totals every order for a delivery date by product, with the number of orders each total came from, and marks the day open or closed so you know before mixing whether the numbers can still move. Opening a day gives the per-customer lines for packing beside the totals, plus a note on the date only you see. The printable sheet is quantity by product with a tick box per line, which is the thing that goes on the bench. Packing slips print the products with no prices on them.
How to turn wholesale orders into a production list covers the totalling step in full.
Three points where the notebook stops holding
- A second baker. The notebook works because it is half in your head. Someone else needs the quantities on paper, in product order, with something to tick. That is the printable sheet rather than a system to learn. Wholesale Handler has one sign-in per business, so a second baker either shares yours or works from the printed sheet.
- A change at 9pm. A cafe can change its own order, including the delivery date, the quantities and the products, until that day's cutoff, and sees the full set of changes before saving. The totals move on their own. After the cutoff the order is locked and the page says so. A merchant cannot edit a locked order in the app today, so the route is to cancel it and place a replacement, where you are not bound by the delivery day or the minimum.
- A week away. Each standing order can be paused until the date you are back, when it resumes on its own, or paused indefinitely. A closure blocks the dates on the order form but does not stop a standing order placing, so the pause is the one that matters.
How to handle wholesale customers who change their orders covers the terms side of a late change.
What Wholesale Handler does not do
It manages orders, not the bake. There are no recipes, no ingredient stock, no costing and no allergen records, so scaling a formula and pricing a loaf stay wherever they live now.
Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule. You select the orders you have processed, they collate into one draft invoice per customer, and finalising emails the PDF. There are no card payments, no automated chasing, and a cafe cannot pull its own invoice PDF. There is no driver run sheet and no route ordering. An account holds up to 50 customers and 500 products.
Pricing is a flat monthly fee whatever the order volume, with no per-user charge and no commission on what the cafes order, and it is free up to 3 cafes with no card.
