How much deposit should you take for a custom cake?

The usual answer is 50%. It is the right answer often enough to be a sensible default, and there are three situations where a different number is better.

What follows is widespread trade practice and the reasoning behind it, not law. Your own terms of trade, and what your payment provider allows, decide what you can actually do.

All figures are in units. Substitute your own currency.

The default: 50% at booking, balance before the make

For a standard dated order taken a few weeks or months ahead, half at booking and half before you start is the structure most makers land on, and it is the one customers already expect.

50% works because on most custom work it lands just above your non-recoverable spend, which is the only property a deposit percentage needs. Take the cake costed at 339.11 in the cake pricing calculator: materials are 32.60 and labour is 112.50. Materials plus labour is 145.10, which is 42.8% of the price. A 50% deposit covers everything you cannot get back, with room. A 25% deposit covers the materials and none of the day.

The floor: what your deposit has to clear

Set the percentage from that calculation rather than from habit.

On the example cake, materials alone are 9.6% of the price. Add a custom topper you ordered in at 40.00 and the non-recoverable spend becomes 72.60, or 21.4%. Anything below that and a cancellation leaves you paying to have taken the order.

Two situations push the number above the floor. Long lead times, where the deposit is holding a date rather than covering materials, and peak dates, where the thing you are giving up is not the cake but the Saturday.

Small orders: take the whole thing

Below a threshold, splitting the payment costs more than the risk it manages.

Collecting a balance is two messages, a follow-up and a diary note, call it 30 minutes across the life of the order. At an hourly rate of 25.00 that is 12.50 of your time spent collecting a second payment. On a 60.00 order the balance is 30.00, and you have burned 12.50 of time chasing it, before counting the ones you never collect.

A workable threshold is three to four times your hourly rate. At 25.00 an hour that is 75.00 to 100.00, and under it you take the full amount at booking. Above it, split.

Dated event work: a non-refundable booking fee

Weddings and any peak-season Saturday are a different product. What the customer is buying at booking is not a cake, it is a date on which you will make no other cake.

The common structure is a non-refundable booking fee to hold the date, then the deposit and balance stacked behind it. Some makers make the fee a flat amount, some make it the first 25% of the order, some make the whole 50% deposit non-refundable. All three are in wide use. What matters is that the fee is sized against the day and not against the cake, because on a peak Saturday the day is worth more than any single order on it.

Holding a date for nothing is the expensive habit. If your Saturday capacity is three cakes at around 300.00 each, the day is worth 900.00. If one in four free holds evaporates and you turned work away to keep it, every free hold costs you about 75.00 in expectation, and the ones that evaporate never tell you.

When the balance should land

Before the make, not at handover.

The reasoning is leverage. Once the cake exists there is only one thing you can do about an unpaid balance, and it is refuse to hand over a cake with someone's child's name piped on it. Nobody does that.

Set the balance a fixed run-up before the event, commonly 7 to 14 days, and pick the number so that it falls due before you buy the ingredients and block out the day. A payment that is going to fail then fails while you can still stop, resell the slot or renegotiate. Tied to the event date rather than the order date, the same rule works on an order taken eight months out and one taken three weeks out.

Say "non-refundable" at order time

In writing, in the same message that names the amount, before any money moves.

Not on a terms page nobody opened, and not in the conversation where you are already refusing a refund. If the first time a customer sees the word is on the day they cancel, the argument is about the word and not about the money, and you will usually lose it whatever your terms say.

Two sentences on the quote is enough: what the deposit is, that it holds the date, and that it is not returned if the order is cancelled.

Deposits filter, which is most of their value

The money is only half the point. A deposit is the cheapest test of whether an enquiry is an order.

An enquiry that will not pay a small amount to hold a date was never going to turn up, and finding that out at booking costs you nothing. Finding it out four days before the event costs you the date, the materials and the slot you turned down. Every maker who has moved from free holds to paid holds reports the same two things: fewer bookings on the calendar, and more of them real.

When someone cancels

Make what you keep a function of notice, because notice is what decides whether the day can be resold.

More than 30 days out, nothing bought. Your exposure is the date, and 30 days is usually long enough to refill it outside peak season. Keep the booking fee, return the rest. This is the cheapest goodwill you will ever buy.

14 to 30 days, materials bought. On the example cake the non-recoverable spend is 32.60, or 72.60 with the bespoke topper, against a 339.11 order. Keep at least that. Most makers keep the whole deposit here, and the case for it is that the date is now hard to resell.

Inside 14 days, or any peak date. The materials are bought, the day is committed and it will not resell. The deposit is retained in full, and if you have already started, the balance is reasonably due as well.

The part that gets hard is not the rule, it is remembering in October which of eleven orders taken in March still owes you something. ibakepro turns the rule into a schedule on every order: a percentage or fixed deposit, a balance row set to remaining and timed a number of days before the event date, with an override so small orders can take a different amount without a second rule. It sizes the rows against the order total and raises the ones past their date. The number stays yours; every payment is one the customer makes or you record; and cancelling an order stops the schedule, with money moving only when you refund it deliberately. See how to take a deposit on a cake order for the setup and payment schedules and deposits for what happens after the first payment lands.