Don't Confuse Cake Orders!

When you are making more than a few custom cakes in one week staying organised is imperative!

We have heard MANY horror stories about cake makers making the wrong cake, having the wrong flavors, not remembering details, and forgetting about paid deposits.  

Whether you are a client or the cake maker, these situations are NOT fun!

At our peak we made 10 wedding cakes in one week and we were terrified that with so many cake orders we would forget something someday.

Thankfully nothing serious ever happened but it was all thanks to staying as organised as possible.

So here is our post on how to stay organised when it comes to your custom cake making!

1. Use A Cake Calendar

Dedicate a calendar to all of your cake making orders.  For ourselves, each year we printed a calendar so that two pages spanned one month.  These sheets were hole-punched and kept in a 3-ring binder.  Also, each month was tabbed so that we could quickly jump between months when looking into inquiries.  Cake orders were written on their designated date.  

We did look into trying to get organised digitally, however, we were just not able to make it efficient or effective enough given the amount of details considered for the quantity being produced.

2.  Use Order Sheets

We took orders via phone, text, messenger, email, and in person...a perfect recipe for losing order details!! 

Whether the order was for a wedding or birthday cake we used order sheets to stay organised.  The order sheets incorporated contact information, a sketch of the cake, notes, and other details. In addition these sheets also served as a simple contract for the client and included my contact information for their future reference. 

We simply photo copied these sheets at cake tastings and filled them behind the corresponding month in the Cake Calendar binder.

Make your own order sheets or modify ours!  Download our free word document via our Google Drive or available on Etsy for the 20 cent listing price:).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwRMU-AIirQgbDJrNjV0Z0xra2M
https://www.etsy.com/listing/502549085/cake-order-sheet?ref=shop_home_active_1

3.  Easy-to-Use Bookkeeping
We loved the quickly and easy set up QuickBooks online.  It is an easy and fast way to help keep track of clients, deposits, payments, and invoices.  You can would also input a lot of the information from the order sheets for wedding invoices for future reference.  On some occasions, in lieu of the order sheets we would create an invoice instead, input details and print and file this paperwork into the cake calendar.  

Best of all these invoices were easy to email and could prompt clients to submit payment.  Payments are also made easy via this bookkeeping.  You can quickly turn off and on credit card payments and keep track of all other methods of payment.  For instance we used Paypal, Chase QuickPay, as well as Venmo. All these methods made client payments more flexible and easier.  And when it came to me tracking them, it was much more efficient:)!

Happy Cake Making!:)