Do any bakery owners use Square to keep track of preorders and prepaid in full orders?

[centurybakery]

Can Square be used to track preorders and paid in full preorders? If not, does anyone have a suggestion for a busy bakery? We currently still use paper order sheets and for some reason the slips have been getting misplaced a lot lately.

[TheRealChipA]

Hey there @centurybakery.  I don’t use preorders, but I’m going to tag some fellow Square Champions (bakery, cafe, etc) who might and see what ideas they have to offer.  Best!

@ryanwanner
@GFC25th
@pawffeeshop
@sugarlab
@indianathomas
@MamiesToffee
@doc_choc
@cupzcoffeeaz
@Lovewell
@StevenCheech
@lenjobakes
@WST90
@AimeeJ
@skafte
@vladslavskii
@tulanejeff
@Traderandco
@kinoscoffee
@BrianaJo

[JRGGlutenfree]

HI - We are a gluten free bakery with an online store - this offers what you are looking for as the orders are all managed inside your square app. It works great for us as we can accept orders in advance and manage them in the app. Hope that helps

[pawffeeshop]

We do not do many pre-orders or prepaid. We are a coffee shop that usually just does in person orders and any preorders are just like one coffee and one bakery item for example. 

[lenjobakes]

Thanks for the tag, @TheRealChipA!

Hey @centurybakery! 

We have an online store which accepts pre-orders (with pick-up during a specified time in the future - perfect for holidays) and "regular" orders with a timed pick-up you can set (like in 2 hours or next day).

@JRGGlutenfree is right in that everything can be managed through the app and dashboard!

My one complaint is that you can't get a report to print to tell you how many of a specific item is due for a specific day. However depending on how you set up your stock tracking, you can always look there to get general numbers.

You also specified for "pre-orders" and "paid in full pre-orders". If someone wants to reserve a product in advance, I set it up on our register (in-store) as a ticket. Inventory recognizes this as a "reservation" and removes it from being able to be sold.

Let me know if any of that is confusing and I'll explain further!

[tulanejeff]

We use Square Online w/ Restaurants app for 90% of our pre-orders (1/2 dozen bagels, dozen bagels, holiday specials). They're actually just online 'orders' with a future pick-up date selected at checkout (you can adjust this for prep time such as 12 or 24 hours advance notice, 1 calendar day, etc.). We found the "preorder" feature to be limiting because it requires an order by date range that will not work if the date has passed. For example, for Mardi Gras we offer special items during a 30-40 day window.

We also still keep a running list on an Apple shared "Note" (shared with key FOH and BOH team members) with all orders for the day (online and paid in person).

In the future, I'd like for pre-orders "paid in person" to be added to the Orders screen of the Restaurants app.

As @lenjobakes mentions, it would be ideal to have a consolidated printed report listing qtys/order pars for each day, especially for peak days like holidays.

[sugarlab]

My entire business is pre-order now so this is totally up my alley! 

Everything but custom designs are available on our website. For all of those orders, we take payment in full when they either order online, or call and place their order over the phone. For custom cakes and cookies, we allow them to pay a 50% deposit. That means they aren't in the order system in square. I have been meaning to test out a placeholder of sorts where it would list the item purchased as $0, but mainly be there with all of our other orders. It hasn't been a problem for us so I haven't felt a strong need to test that system. 

Even with the square orders, we have a paper system. We have a carbon copy order form. When an order is placed, we create the paper order form and add it to the appropriate date in our monthly binders. We then mark it as "in-progress" on square. That help the team know that an order has been written up. Then, when it's about a week before, I pull the bottom, yellow page and have that in the kitchen on my production boards. The white page stays in the binder. That lets the front of house team still be able to access any information without having to go into the kitchen. It also means we have two places for orders, in addition to the Square system, if applicable. 

For holiday pre-orders, I will export the orders to an excel spreadsheet. Then I have it sort by the item, day pick-up, or what ever information I need. That's what I use to know my quantities for things. When I had my retail shop, we wouldn't get too many Square orders all in one day on non-holidays times so I never really did the excel thing otherwise.

Happy to help with any bakery system questions too. I love a good system haha!