Product builder and variants

A 25 cm (10 in) cake is not two 15 cm (6 in) cakes. It is roughly 2.8 times the batter and nothing like 2.8 times the labour, and if you price it by doubling the small one you lose money on every large order you take.

The product builder exists so the sizes you sell come from the same recipe data, scaled by geometry and corrected by measurements you took. It is on every plan.

Three layers, no double counting

Pantry items are the raw layer: flour, butter, boards, boxes, each with a cost per unit and a supplier.

Components are recipes built from pantry items: a sponge, a buttercream, a ganache, a packaging set. A component carries variants, so one buttercream component covers the amount a small tier needs and the amount a large one does.

Products are built from components. A component that already owns a pantry item is never charged again at product level, so the same butter cannot land in your cost twice.

Size ladders

Sizes are not hard-coded. You define ladders in the products area, and each ladder has a kind that decides how amounts move across its rungs.

Sizes with dimensions. Real dimensions, like cake tiers. Recipes scale between them and they can carry heights.
Sold by the piece. Like cookies. Amounts scale by how many.
Named sizes. Small, medium, large. You set the amounts for each one, and nothing is interpolated because there is no geometry to interpolate.

A product type is attached to a ladder, and the ladder kind decides which editor you get. A size still used by a component or product cannot be deleted, and ibakepro shows you what is using it.

How scaling works

For a dimensional ladder, batter scales with volume. A round tier is treated as a cylinder, a square one as its side squared times its height. Other shapes are approximated as round, which is worth knowing before you build a heart tin into a ladder.

Then you correct it. You bake a size, weigh what it took and record it as an anchor with a multiplier. Between anchors ibakepro interpolates linearly. Outside your outermost anchor it clamps rather than extrapolating, so a curve fitted between a 15 cm (6 in) and a 25 cm (10 in) will not invent a number for a 40 cm (16 in) it has never seen.

Two refinements exist and both matter in practice. An individual ingredient can carry its own multipliers at an anchor, so a flavouring that does not scale with volume follows its own fit while everything else follows the row. And portions and labour are separate lanes, so you can say a bigger tier serves more people without claiming it takes proportionally longer to decorate.

Count and weight ladders work the same way in their own coordinate space: straight ratio when you have no anchors, anchor-corrected once you add them.

Variants

A variant is one sellable configuration of a product. You can scaffold one priced variant per size the product covers, named automatically and priced at your target margin from its own derived cost. The base configuration keeps its own size, so scaffolding does not create a duplicate of it.

Per-size upcharges let an option cost more on a larger cake without you managing a separate price list.

Change the components and the scaffolded variants pick up the new cost, packaging included, because a different box is a different cost.

Customer choices

Choices are the flavour, filling and finish decisions a customer makes. An option is not just a label with a price on it: it is a mini recipe, with its own pantry items, its own labour minutes and its own upcharge, and it rides the same scaling engine the component sheet uses. The base row is typed by you, the rest fills in from the curve and any computed cell can be overridden by clicking it and typing.

Because options link to real pantry items, choosing salted caramel costs the right ingredients into the order and draws the right stock down.

If a component has no usable base yield there is nothing to scale, so the ladder drops to plain typed inputs for every row rather than pretending to compute them.

Design decisions

Anchors are measurements you take. A ladder without them is pure geometry, which is a decent first guess.
Beyond your outermost anchor the correction holds flat, rather than inventing a number for a size it has never seen.
Round and square are modelled exactly. Other shapes approximate as round, which is worth knowing before a heart tin joins a ladder.
Packaging is authored in the full builder, and it is costed separately.
Labour is minutes times your rate. If a design takes longer, put the minutes in.
Scaffolded variants start at your target margin, and the final price is yours. Read pricing a custom cake before you accept them, and what a product costs to make for the cost side.

Product builder: components, sizes and variants