How ibakepro started

ibakepro is bakery management software for bakeries that make to order, covering recipe and product costing, orders and quotes, ingredient inventory, deposits and payments, an online storefront, wholesale ordering, deliveries, food safety records and marketing. The fuller definition is at what is ibakepro.

ibakepro was built for one cake business, by the two people running it. One of us has decorated cakes for more than ten years, for her own business and for other shops around Sydney. The other has been a software developer since 2015, and still is.

It started with paper

When we met, the cake side of things ran on paper. Orders in a diary, quotes worked out in her head, no website, no accounting to speak of. The work was good and the customers came back. What was missing was any way of knowing whether a particular cake had made money, or how much a particular cake had actually cost to make.

That is a more common position than people admit. A decorator who is excellent at the craft can still be guessing at the numbers, because the numbers are genuinely awkward: an ingredient bought in a five kilogram bag, used forty grams at a time, in a recipe that makes three tiers, one of which is a different flavour.

The first version was a website

The first thing built was a custom site that took orders, sent the confirmation emails and connected to Stripe so customers could actually pay. It ran on a database that has since been shut down, which is its own lesson about depending on other people's infrastructure.

It worked, and it was not enough. So the next version was a custom storefront built on Shopify, which is a serious piece of commerce software and handles a great deal well.

Cakes are not the shape ecommerce expects

This is where it became clear that the problem was not the tooling being cheap or basic. It was that ordinary ecommerce assumes you are selling an item that exists, that ships when it is ready, and that is paid for in full at the checkout.

A custom cake is none of those things. It does not exist yet. It is needed on a specific date, and that date is the whole point: a birthday cake that arrives the day after is not a late delivery, it is a refund. It is usually paid in two parts, a deposit now and a balance later. And it is specified through a conversation, not a product page: flavours, fillings, tiers, colours, a photo of something the customer saw somewhere else.

Event dates and deposits are not features you can bolt onto a system that was not built expecting them. That is what sent us back to building.

An internal tool that grew

ibakepro started in December 2024, and it was not a product. It was an internal tool for our own storefront, doing the unglamorous work of keeping product data straight. Over the following months it took on the parts that kept causing problems: what an order actually costs, what is in the pantry, what has been paid and what has not, which allergens are in which product and how that changes when an ingredient does.

In 2025 it became a multi-tenant product that other bakeries could use, rather than a private tool for one.

What that background actually changes

Being built for a working bakery first shows up in specific decisions, usually the cautious ones.

When a supplier price changes, ibakepro updates what your products cost, and deliberately does not move what you charge. When an ingredient's allergens change, every affected product is flagged for review and the published allergen label stays exactly as it was until a person confirms it. Both of those could be automatic. Neither is, because an allergen label is a legal document and a price is a promise to a customer, and having a machine change either one while you are not looking is not a feature.

It also shows up in the mistakes. For a while, packaging cost nothing in our own product: boards, boxes and dowels were simply missing from the cost of a cake, which quietly understated the cost of every single order. We found it, fixed it, and it is why packaging is now costed per fulfilment method, so the same cake can cost differently to collect, to deliver, or to post.

Where it is now

ibakepro is still used every day by the bakery it was built for. That is the main reason it keeps getting more specific rather than more general: the fastest way for something to get fixed is for it to annoy someone mid-order on a Friday.

If you want to see how any of it works, the feature pages go through it in detail, and the blog covers the business side of running a bakery whether or not you use any software for it.