Home Bakery & Cottage Food Order Tracker Spreadsheet
This spreadsheet works out what an order actually paid you for an hour of your time, once the oven, the drive, the card fee and your overheads are counted against it.
Costing a recipe tells you what the ingredients came to, which is worth knowing and has never yet explained why a busy month left nothing in the account. Home bakers do not usually lose money; they lose hours. This file costs the recipe too, and then puts your time, your mileage, your oven and the overheads you pay whether or not anybody orders next to it.
What is in it
- Seven linked tabs, from Start Here to a one-screen Overview of the period with the overheads included.
- Setup — what your hour is worth, the oven per hour, mileage, the card fee, and the overheads for the period: insurance, registration, equipment, waste.
- Ingredients — 60 rows. Pack size and pack cost in; cost per gram, millilitre or each out, to four decimal places.
- Recipes — 30 recipes and 200 ingredient lines: what a batch makes, how long it takes and what goes in it, with cost per batch and cost per unit calculated.
- Orders — 200 rows. Ten columns you type and eight that work themselves out, including what was quoted, what was taken as a deposit and what is still owed.
- What Pays — everything you make, ranked by what it paid you an hour.
Who it is for
Home bakers and cottage food producers working out of a domestic kitchen and taking orders: celebration and wedding cakes, cupcakes, brownies, sourdough — and equally jams, sauces, candles or soap, since anything made in batches from ingredients and sold to order works the same way.
The worked example
The worked half-year in the file holds twenty-seven orders and 145.5 hours at the bench. The three-tier wedding cake — the photograph everyone asks for — invoiced $420.00 and netted $304.45 after $54.09 of ingredients, the oven, a 24-mile delivery, packaging and the card fee. Spread over 22.0 hours across four days, that is $13.84 an hour. Six trays of brownies for a cafe at $84.00 a time — four hours, one oven, four miles — paid $19.26 an hour, the best-paid thing on the list and the only one nobody ever photographs.
Nothing in the book cleared $22.00 an hour. The best came to $19.26 and the worst, sourdough of all things, to $3.71. Across the half-year the orders invoiced $2,173.00 and left $1,492.42, and once the $487.00 of overheads for the period came off, what she actually kept was $1,005.42 — a 46.3% net margin, $10.26 an hour before overheads and $6.91 after. There was also $87.00 sitting across two orders that nobody had chased.
How it works
Compatible with Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ons, no account to create, nothing to install.
The download has two workbooks: one with the example above already filled in, so you can see what every column expects, and the same file completely blank for your own figures. A plain-English guide comes as a PDF. WhatsApp’tan sipariş ver — $9
Orders are taken on WhatsApp: message me and I’ll send the payment details, then the files as soon as the payment is confirmed.
A look inside the file
Questions people actually ask
How do I work out what a cake order actually paid me per hour?
The file costs the recipe from your ingredient prices, then subtracts the oven, the mileage, the card fee and any extra packaging from what you invoiced, and divides the rest by the hours you worked. In the worked half-year a three-tier wedding cake invoiced at $420.00 leaves $304.45 net over 22.0 hours — $13.84 an hour — while six trays of brownies for a cafe at $84.00 pay $19.26 an hour over four hours. Nothing in the book cleared $22.00 an hour, and the worst, sourdough, came to $3.71.
Does it only work for baking, or can I use it for jams, candles or soap?
Anything made in batches from ingredients and sold to order works exactly the same way — jams, sauces, candles, soap — and the words on the tabs are the only thing that says baking. It holds 60 ingredients, 30 recipes, 200 recipe lines and 200 orders, a comfortable year for most home kitchens. It also tracks deposits: in the worked half-year, $350.00 of deposits and $1,736.00 of balances came in, with $87.00 across two orders still outstanding.
I do not weigh everything precisely. Is it still worth doing?
Yes — put a rough cost against a recipe and fill the orders in honestly, because the hours and the delivery are where the surprise lives, not the flour. Ingredient costs are worked out from pack size and pack cost to four decimal places per gram, millilitre or each, so one careful entry per ingredient covers every recipe that uses it. In the worked half-year, 27 orders and 145.5 hours produced $1,492.42 net and $1,005.42 after $487.00 of overheads — $10.26 an hour before overheads and $6.91 after.
Do I need special software, or a subscription?
Neither — it is a .xlsx workbook that opens in Excel 2016 or newer on Windows and Mac, in Google Sheets through File then Import then Upload, and in LibreOffice. There are no macros, no add-ons, nothing to install and no account to create. You download the file and it is yours.
Will it set my prices for me?
No — it tells you what your current prices pay you an hour, which is the number you need before you decide what to charge. It is not a recipe costing sheet either: a costing sheet stops at ingredients, while this adds your hours, the oven, the drive, the card fee and your overheads. It is not an order calendar or booking system, it connects to no shop, till or payment account, and it is not food safety, tax or accounting advice.
Need it built around your business?
This file assumes one baker, one kitchen, orders quoted with a deposit and either collected or driven out locally. If yours works differently — a standing wholesale order delivered to the same three cafes every week, a market stall where you bake to stock rather than to order, a second pair of hands paid by the hour on busy weekends — I can build the same arithmetic around the way your kitchen actually runs.
All other templates are listed on the Excel & Google Sheets Templates page.