Let's cut through it.
The main categories
Order management systems
Track customer orders, generate invoices, manage delivery schedules. This is the core workflow for wholesale bakeries. If you're taking orders by phone/email and manually creating invoices, this is what you need.
Point of sale (POS) systems
Built for retail - walk-in customers, quick transactions, tip screens. Wrong tool for wholesale. You're not ringing up croissants at a counter.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
The everything-system. Inventory, accounting, HR, production, purchasing. Designed for operations with 50+ employees and complex supply chains. Massive overkill for a bakery with 10-50 wholesale customers.
Inventory management
Tracks ingredients, stock levels, reorder points. Separate concern from order management. Most wholesale bakeries bake to order anyway - you're not warehousing finished goods.
Why this gets confusing
Sales reps bundle everything together and call it "integrated." They'll show you dashboards with 47 metrics you don't track and convince you that "advanced production planning" will transform your business.
It won't. You'll spend three months learning the software and another six months ignoring 80% of its features.
Feature breakdown: what you actually need vs. what gets sold
Customer portal (Essential)
Customers place their own orders online. You stop playing phone tag and manually entering orders at 11pm.
This is the feature that actually saves time. If software doesn't have this, keep looking.
Payment processing (Expensive, usually unnecessary)
Software companies love integrated payments - they take 2.5-3% of every transaction on top of your subscription fee.
The pitch
"Seamless payments! Automatic reconciliation!"
The reality
You're already invoicing wholesale customers with NET 30 or NET 15 terms. They pay by bank transfer or check. Nobody's swiping a credit card for a £400 bread order.
The math
£20,000/month in orders × 2.5% = £500/month in fees. That's £6,000/year to solve a problem you don't have.
Some bakeries do need this (farmer's markets, online retail orders). But if you're running standard wholesale terms, you're just paying extra.
Recipe management (Separate from ordering)
Tracks ingredient quantities, costs per item, recipe scaling.
Useful for product costing and production planning, but it's not order management. You can run this in a spreadsheet or dedicated recipe software. Doesn't need to live in the same system where customers place orders.
Most "integrated" recipe modules are clunky anyway - built by developers who've never scaled a sourdough recipe.
Production planning (Oversold)
The promise
Smart scheduling, batch optimization, automatic production sheets.
The reality
You already know how to plan production. You've been doing it for years. You look at Thursday's orders and bake Wednesday night. Software can generate a production list from orders (helpful), but the "AI-powered optimization" is solving a problem you don't have.
For bakeries under 50 customers, production planning is pattern recognition, not algorithmic complexity.
Inventory tracking (Do you though?)
Most wholesale bakeries bake to order. You're not managing a warehouse of finished croissants wondering how many you have left.
Ingredient inventory matters for purchasing, but it's a separate workflow from order management. You don't need real-time stock levels updating every time someone orders a loaf - you need to know when to reorder flour.
If you're actually warehousing products with variable shelf life, inventory tracking becomes essential. But most wholesale operations aren't.
Nutritional labeling (Compliance only)
Required if you're selling packaged goods in retail stores. Not required for wholesale orders to cafes and restaurants.
If you need it, you need it. If you don't, it's useless bloat.
Route planning (The biggest scam)
Software companies charge extra for "optimized delivery routes with turn-by-turn navigation."
Here's the thing: you have 10-50 customers in a local area. You've been driving these routes for months or years. You know that the cafe on Market Street is before the restaurant on High Street because that's how geography works.
Route optimization makes sense for courier services with 100+ daily stops across a city. For wholesale bakeries with established routes and recurring customers, it's a £20/month feature solving a problem from a completely different industry.
You're not UPS. You don't need route optimization.
What you actually need for 10-50 customers
- Customer portal where customers place orders
- Order dashboard where you see what's been ordered
- Invoice generation so you can bill people
- Delivery schedule so you know who gets what when
- Customer contact info in one place instead of scattered texts
That's it. That's the system.
Everything else is either
- A separate workflow that doesn't need integration (recipe costing, ingredient inventory)
- A solution to a problem you don't have (route planning, real-time inventory)
- A way to charge you more money (payment processing at 2.5%)
Why "all-in-one" usually means "all-in-the-way"
Integrated platforms sound efficient. In practice, you're paying for a bunch of modules you don't use while the core ordering workflow - the part you actually need - gets complicated by features designed for different business models.
You don't need software designed for a regional bread distributor with 200 customers and a fleet of trucks. You need software for a wholesale bakery with local delivery and recurring orders.
In short
If you're currently taking orders by phone and email, you need order management software with a customer portal. That's the upgrade that saves time.
Everything else is either nice-to-have or genuinely unnecessary depending on your operation.
Most wholesale bakeries don't need payment processing, route planning, or production optimization. You need to stop manually entering orders and chasing customers for their weekly bread count.
That's the problem worth solving. Everything else is feature creep.
Wholesale Handler's position
Wholesale Handler does one thing: order management for wholesale bakeries with 10-50 customers. No payment processing fees. No route planning upsells. No modules you'll never open. Just orders, invoices, and a customer portal. £30/month.