As a baker, you like to pick only the best ingredients, to create the perfect blend – and the perfect cake.

But no matter how tasty your cakes and pies are, your bakery will not thrive unless you invest in a good wholesale bakery software. In a market as crowded as ours, there is software available right and left, each more unique than the other.

So how do you pick the perfect bakery software? Let’s walk you through the must-have features you should look out for:

Forecasting

This sounds technical for even the most humble bakeries out there – but it is very important. Bakeries can predict cash flow, monitor prices and control functioning costs with accuracy – all thanks to a good sales forecasting system.

The bakery software you pick should produce abundant sales forecasts, using historic sales and previous business trends. This will help create a launching pad for you to execute the release of new and promising products in the future. They will also help you plan human resources ahead of time by predicting possibly unforeseen business demands like new hires, surprise layoffs, etc.

Sales, sales, sales

The bakery POS system you pick should be a master of sales – and for good measure. Understanding sales data lets you know which baked good is the most popular among your customers, what item needs a strategic boost, or what product is no longer selling on the menu. This helps you manage inventory a lot better since you can now paint a better picture of which ingredients need to be restocked, and which are turning dusty with disuse.

Fortunately, Oscar POS offers a plethora of sales features, which includes recording sales history, tracking in real-time and timely analytics, ultimately helping you expect confident forecasts, make accurate stock reports, and ensure business growth.

Inventory Management

Your inventory count must be as accurate as the ingredients you use to bake the perfect cake. Therefore, it should have a feature that updates stock levels of all ingredients in real-time, so that an exact amount of each ingredient is recorded as soon as a certain recipe has been used. This helps track spoilage, stockouts and dusty inventory better.

And other features that optimize your warehouse functions are just the icing on that cake – systems like Oscar are advanced enough to not only offer low-stock inventory alerts but also streamline inventory functions for multiple locations.

Customer Relationship Management

It is interesting to note that ensuring loyal customer relationships in a time as busy as ours is a lot more difficult than you’d think. Luckily, it is not impossible; businesses prefer creating customer profiles. Every interaction a customer makes provides a bit of data – it can be their order, the amount they paid, the coupon they used, or their contact information. This helps give a business an idea of what the customer wants from them.

For your bakery, the ideal solution is a Customer Relationship Management – or CRM – software. Systems like Oscar POS have it integrated within their point of sale so that you can offer the best customer support. This not only ensures a great end-user experience in terms of faster service, but also gives you the power to predict things like times of high store traffic, or best-selling products. The rest is inevitable: with targeted marketing, comes more personalised customer relationships.

Modern point-of-sale systems have grown immensely because now they can do a lot more than just handling cash like the cash register; they can carry out even the most complicated processes like accounting and real-time reporting. Therefore you should always consider using such a range of features to your bakery’s advantage.

Upgrading your bakery’s game is now a piece of cake.