Bakery & Sweets POS: Sold by the Kilo, Baked Today, Gone Tomorrow
A bakery sells the same product three ways: by the kilo at the counter, by the piece from the display, and by the box to order. It is all made fresh, all dated, and what is left on Sunday night is a loss rather than stock.
The Bakery & sweets preset covers the weight and the dates, which are the two things ordinary retail software gets wrong here.
What the bakery preset switches on
- Sell by weight — mithai by the kilo and half kilo, with decimals that survive to the bill.
- Batch & expiry — a made-on date per batch, oldest sold first, and a warning before anything is past it.
The till is a grid with large tiles, and credit is off by default — a bakery counter is a cash counter — though you can switch it on for the shops that supply offices and events.
By the kilo, by the piece, by the box
Kilograms lead the unit list, with pieces and boxes behind. A product can carry a pack size, so a box of twelve is priced and counted as a box while the stock behind it is understood.
For items you price on the spot — a custom cake, a mixed box — mark the product as variable price and the till asks for the amount as it goes into the cart. Cancelling adds nothing, so a custom item can never be recorded at zero by mistake.
Freshness, tracked without ceremony
Batch tracking is normally described in terms of pharmaceutical recalls. In a bakery it does something simpler and more useful: it tells you what was made when. Sales draw from the oldest batch first, so yesterday's tray goes before today's, and the "expiring soon" screen is really a "sell this now" list.
Packaged goods a bakery also sells — drinks, crisps, tinned items — can have batch tracking switched off per product, so the delivery form only asks where it applies.
What today actually made
A bakery's margin is thin and moves with ingredient prices, so profit has to be based on what stock actually cost. GOF POS values stock on a weighted average cost that only a goods receipt can move, not the editable purchase-price field — so fixing a typo in a price does not rewrite last month's profit.
The dashboard shows today's profit computed the same way the full profit and loss report computes it, from one shared calculation. Two screens answering the same question with different numbers is worse than one screen.
Returns and waste are netted on both sides — the sale value and the cost — so taking stock back does not overstate your costs and understate your margin.
Peak hour
Eid, weddings and Friday evenings are the whole year for some bakeries. The till is built to keep working when the internet does not: the desktop app holds its own database and syncs when the connection returns, so a queue never stops moving because of a router.
Split payments are supported for the larger orders — part cash, part card — recorded as separate legs so the drawer count at close stays correct.
Staff and shifts
Most bakeries run more than one shift. Each cashier opens and closes their own drawer, and the close compares the counted cash against what should be there — including cash taken out for expenses during the shift, which is where most unexplained shortfalls actually come from.
A closed shift cannot be edited afterwards. That is the point: a variance somebody signed off has to stay investigable.
Getting started
Setup takes about ten minutes. When you sign up you pick Bakery & sweets as your business type, and GOF POS switches on the features above for you — no configuration screens to hunt through, no consultant. If something in the preset does not suit you, every switch is yours to change afterwards in Settings → Business type.
The app runs on Windows, macOS and Linux for the counter, and on Android and iOS for stock checks and quick sales on the move. The desktop till keeps working when the internet does not, and syncs when it comes back.
See pricing or download GOF POS and try it on a real day's trading.
