Excel Spreadsheets for Home Bakers Honest Feedback Wanted

[BethP]

I’ve been creating some Excel spreadsheets for home bakers and small food businesses and would love some honest feedback from people who actually bake/sell.
I've made things like a recipe cost calculator and a baking business tracker to help with ingredient costs, pricing, profit, orders and expenses.
I'm trying to work out whether these are genuinely useful in real life, rather than just something that looks good on paper.
What would you find useful in a spreadsheet like this? Is there anything important you think I've missed?
I've put a few examples below.
Thanks!

 

[retired baker]

I had a spreasheet for daily production, 12 wholesale accounts all ordering a variety of up to 8 different products daily.
The spreadsheet made it easy to generate production numbers as orders were different depending on days, mondays were slow vs fri, sat and sunday. It wasn't vital , it was just more efficient than changing daily totals by hand.

I didn't need any spreadsheets for running the retail production or inventory, I knew what I had and what I needed.
I knew my inventory because I am the one using it, I'm the one ordering every week and I always spent 2 minutes checking what I had on hand. I would never trust a spreadsheet for inventory, I want to put my eyes on them,

Custom work is different, if your customers order anything their heart desires you lose the efficiency of having inventory already on hand. Eggs, milk, flour, sugar, they're common ingredients to all cakes, the killer is when you have to go shopping for unique ingredients.

 

[Bakingtime3]

How it would be used or who would find it worthwhile probably depends on a lot of factors and not something you can generically develop. I agree that tracking/accounting for custom orders requires different considerations from standard orders. If you run a bakery selling daily/weekly standing orders would be a lot different from managing costs/inventory for one-time custom orders.

Are you trying to develop an Excel/app based product you want to sell or just doing this as a hobby? How to input/manage information is probably something each person would have their own preferences. How large of a business and how many employees would also matter. From the attached pictures/jpeg image we can't really tell how it works or what the input looks like and are only seeing the summary page. Might try to find some local friends who run a food business from home and see what they think of the actual spreadsheet(s).

 

[BethP]

How it would be used or who would find it worthwhile probably depends on a lot of factors and not something you can generically develop. I agree that tracking/accounting for custom orders requires different considerations from standard orders. If you run a bakery selling daily/weekly standing orders would be a lot different from managing costs/inventory for one-time custom orders.

Are you trying to develop an Excel/app based product you want to sell or just doing this as a hobby? How to input/manage information is probably something each person would have their own preferences. How large of a business and how many employees would also matter. From the attached pictures/jpeg image we can't really tell how it works or what the input looks like and are only seeing the summary page. Might try to find some local friends who run a food business from home and see what they think of the actual spreadsheet(s).

Thanks, that’s really helpful. I’m actually developing it as a product to sell, aimed mainly at home bakers and small baking businesses. I agree that custom orders can need different tracking, so I’m looking at making the spreadsheet practical for real-world use rather than just having a nice summary page.
The screenshots I posted were only showing the summary, so I can see why it wasn’t clear how the actual input/calculations work. I’ll take your point on board and get some feedback from actual home bakers before finalising it. Thanks for the honest feedback