Bakery Production Planning, With a Daily Bake Sheet

Bakery production planning, day to day, comes down to one sheet. For each product: tomorrow's par level, minus what's left over and still sellable, plus orders, rounded up to full trays or oven decks. Then add up the dough each product needs, scale every dough by its baker's percentages, and split it into mixes your mixer can hold. Finally, put the work in order, longest fermentation first. Below is a real day's bake sheet worked through, from pars to the scaler's pull list, and a free Excel version that does the arithmetic every evening.

The short version

• Bake = par − sellable leftovers + orders, rounded up to a full tray or deck.
• Each product's dough = units × dough weight per unit. Add up products that share a dough.
• Add a little for loss in mixing and dividing, 2% here.
• Flour = total dough ÷ the sum of the baker's percentages. Every other ingredient = flour × its percentage.
• Split each dough into mixes the mixer can hold.
• Order the day: the dough that takes longest goes first.
• Write sold-outs and leftovers on the sheet, and move the pars every week.
• TaroStack keeps the pars, the recipes and the stock behind the sheet. More below.

Step 1: what to bake

Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, has a shop and a few wholesale customers. Here's the bake sheet for Friday, October 2, 2026, filled in on Thursday afternoon:

The par is what the shop sells on a Friday plus a little: the average of the last four Fridays, rounded up. The leftovers are only what's still good enough to sell tomorrow: the bread keeps five days, and the cookies are packed. The orders are the café's 12 loaves and a catering order of two dozen rolls.

Then round up to what the oven takes. A deck holds 6 loaves, so 38 becomes 42; the 4 extra loaves are tomorrow's leftovers, which is fine for bread that keeps. Rounding down instead would save 4 loaves and leave the shop short by lunchtime. How pars relate to reordering is in par level vs reorder point.

Step 2: add up the dough

Loaves and rolls share one dough, so they go in one mix:

The sweet dough is 46,320 g. Some always stays on the bowl, the hook and the bench, so divide by 0.98 for a 2% loss: 47,265 g to mix. The mixer holds 25 kg of this dough, so that's two mixes of about 23.6 kg. The cookie dough, 4,320 g plus loss, is 4,408 g: one mix.

Step 3: scale it by baker's percentages

A baker's percentage is each ingredient's weight as a share of the flour, which is 100%. It's the right way to write a production formula, because it scales to any batch with one division: flour = total dough ÷ the sum of the percentages.

47,265 ÷ 2.096 = 22,550 g of flour, and everything else follows from it. (Water isn't in the costing recipe in the inventory template with recipes, because it costs nothing. It's here because the mixer needs it.)

The cookie dough is scaled the same way, from its own percentages: 1,155 g of flour, 919 g of butter, 811 g of sugar, 547 g of macadamia nuts, 527 g of taro paste, 405 g of egg, 24 g of salt and 20 g of baking soda. Where those percentages come from, a home recipe in cups turned into a production formula, is in scaling recipes for production.

Step 4: the pull list

Add both doughs together and the scaler has one list for the morning, which is also tomorrow's stock check:

The taro paste is the line to look at on Thursday afternoon. It keeps a week, it comes fresh twice a week, and 14.1 kg is most of a delivery. If there's only 9 kg in the walk-in, the time to find out is now, not at 4 a.m.

Step 5: put the day in order

Longest first: the dough that needs to ferment goes in before anything that doesn't, and anything that can be made the day before is. A week of this, with the oven loads across days, is in the production schedule example.

Step 6: write down what happened

At closing, write two numbers next to each product: what time it sold out, if it did, and what was left. Three Fridays of rolls gone by 11 means the par is wrong. Three Fridays of 8 cookies over means it's wrong the other way. The pars are the only part of the sheet that's a guess, and the sheet is where the evidence for fixing them collects.

Get the bake sheet

Download the daily bakery production sheet. It has the bake sheet with the pars, leftovers, orders and tray rounding, and the doughs tab that adds up each dough, scales it by baker's percentages and splits it into mixes. Change tonight's numbers and tomorrow's quantities and weights follow. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, it prints, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Bake         =ROUNDUP(MAX(0, par - leftover + orders) / per tray, 0) * per tray
Flour        =dough to mix / sum of baker's %
Ingredient   =flour * baker's %
Mixes        =ROUNDUP(dough to mix / mixer capacity, 0)

Where this stops working

The sheet is only as good as three things someone types every afternoon: the leftovers, the orders and the stock. The leftovers are a count of the shelf at closing. The orders are in a notebook, an inbox and a voicemail. The stock is whatever someone remembers is in the walk-in. Miss the café's text and Friday is 12 loaves short; forget that the taro paste was used for a test batch and the 4 a.m. scaler finds 9 kg. And the pars, which should move every week, stay where they were set in spring because nobody has time to look back at three weeks of sheets.

How TaroStack does it

In TaroStack the pieces of the sheet live where they're kept up to date anyway. The pars are minimum and maximum levels per item and site. The orders are sales orders, entered when the café calls, not remembered at 3 p.m. The stock is what's really there, kept current by every delivery, batch and sale, so "what could I make right now" answers the taro paste question on Thursday, not at 4 a.m. And the planning suggests what to make from orders, stock and your own sales history, as a draft you approve.

Recipes can contain other recipes, so the sweet dough is one recipe feeding both the loaves and the rolls, and the quantities follow the number you're making. Recording the bake takes the flour, butter and taro paste from their lots automatically, so stock is right for tomorrow's sheet and the lots are on record if a supplier ever recalls one. Work centers and their hours keep a week's plan from promising more oven than you have. TaroStack doesn't work in baker's percentages; the template does that part.

Recipes, batches and planning are on Standard at $99 a month, and the first 30 days are free. Your recipes import from a spreadsheet. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How do bakeries plan production?

Every day, from a bake sheet: par level for each product, minus sellable leftovers, plus orders, rounded up to full trays. The doughs are then added up across products and scaled by baker's percentages into mixes, and the work is put in order, longest fermentation first.

How do you set par levels in a bakery?

Start with the average sold on that day of the week over the last few weeks, round up a little, and adjust every week from what sold out and what was left over. Different days get different pars.

What is a bake sheet?

The daily list of what to bake and how much, usually with the doughs, their weights and the order of work. It's the day's production plan for a bakery.

How do you use baker's percentages to scale a recipe?

Write every ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight. To make any amount of dough, divide the total by the sum of the percentages to get the flour, then multiply the flour by each percentage.