How to manage bakery inventory without losing your mind

If you've ever opened the walk-in at 6am to realise you have no yeast, this post is for you.

Bakery inventory has a few sharp edges that most general-purpose stock tools ignore:

• Ingredients deplete unevenly. A cake uses 50g of vanilla; a bake of sourdough uses 5g of salt. You need per-unit tracking, not case counts.
• Suppliers sell in weird units. Flour in 16kg sacks, eggs in trays of 30, butter in 25kg blocks. You need unit conversions baked in.
• Price drift matters. Flour went up 14% last year. If your bake-cost calculator doesn't read current prices, your margins are fiction.

The three-rule system

1. Set par levels by ingredient. How much do you need to cover a busy week? Double it. That's your par.
2. Deduct automatically from orders. Every online order and every production run should tick down the catalogue. No post-hoc accounting.
3. Reorder at 30%. Not at 0%. Not at 10%. At 30% of par. Lead time is your enemy, not your friend.

Bakerly's inventory module does all three. You tell it the recipes and the par levels; it does the counting.

What to do this week

Open a spreadsheet, list every ingredient you buy, write down:

• Current price per unit
• Typical supplier pack size
• Par level (your "I feel safe" amount)

That's a 30-minute job. When you import it into Bakerly, you're done forever.