What is the best software for a home bakery in Australia?

An Australian home baker, whether you bake custom cakes, sourdough for weekend pre-orders or cookies for the local market, needs four things from software: card deposits in AUD, ingredient-level allergen records, GST ready for when you register, and data kept in Australia. ibakepro does all four, from A$26 a month, with a 14-day free trial.

What an Australian home baker actually needs

Deposits at booking, balances before the date. Most custom work in Australia, from a birthday cake to 100 favour cookies for a wedding, is booked weeks ahead with a deposit to hold the date. Software should take the deposit by card when the customer accepts, work out the balance and chase it before collection, without you watching a list of dates.

Allergens that follow the ingredients. Since 25 February 2024 the Food Standards Code has required allergens on food labels to be declared in plain English terms, in bold, in a set format and location. Whether your own products need a full label depends on how you package and sell them, which your council or state food authority will tell you, but every home baker needs the ingredient-level record behind the answer. Typing allergens onto each order by hand is how a "may contain" goes missing.

GST that is ready when you are. The ATO lists cakes, pastries and biscuits as taxable food while plain bread is GST-free, and registration is required at A$75,000 GST turnover, current or projected. Many home bakers start below that line and cross it. Your software should let you switch GST on and set the rate by product category without rebuilding your prices. The detail is in do I charge GST on cakes in Australia.

Prices in dollars, data in Australia. Customers pay in AUD, and your customer records, addresses and order history are personal information that some bakers prefer kept onshore.

Costing from what you actually paid. Flour, butter, eggs and cream move in price through the year. A loaf or a cake you priced last winter may be making less now, and the only way to know is to cost it from current ingredient prices.

How ibakepro covers it

ibakepro serves Australian bakers from a home kitchen up to a shop with staff, and costs each order from what you paid for ingredients. For an Australian home bakery, that means:

• Quotes and deposits. One quote can carry several options, the customer picks one in their order page and pays the deposit by card through your own Stripe account. Payment schedules can make the balance due a set number of days before the event, and reminders repeat until it is paid. See payment schedules and deposits.
• Allergens. Each pantry item carries its allergens as contains, processed in or may contain, and they flow up through recipes to products, orders and the storefront. If a customer has not chosen a flavour yet, every allergen it could contain is shown. See allergen management.
• GST. GST is one of the tax types you can choose, with the rate you set, including a different rate by product category.
• AUD and Sydney. Your subscription is billed in Australian dollars, and Australian accounts can choose the Australian data region, hosted in Sydney.
• Costing. Every product is costed from the price you paid for each ingredient, so a supplier price change shows up in your margins. See recipe costing.

Which plan fits a home bakery

Most home bakers start on Essentials and move to Growth when they want a shop that takes payment online or pass about two orders a week. The full breakdown is in is ibakepro right for a home baker, and the Australian setup is on bakery software for Australian bakers.

The 14-day trial includes every feature of the plan you pick, so the useful test is to load the ingredients for your three best sellers, cost them, and see whether the numbers match what you thought you were making.