How do I switch bakery software without losing my orders and customers?
Export ingredients, supplies, customers, upcoming orders and expenses from your old system or spreadsheet as CSV files and import them into ibakepro, up to 2,500 rows per file. Products are rebuilt rather than imported, so each one is costed from what you actually pay for its ingredients. The move usually fits in a weekend, and you can keep the old system open, read-only, as a reference.
A switching plan
- Pick a quiet week. Not the fortnight before Christmas or Mother's Day.
- Export everything you can from the old system: customers, orders (at least every future-dated one), ingredients with prices, supplies and expenses. Keep a full copy of the raw exports.
- Import in this order: ingredients and supplies, customers, upcoming orders (recent history can follow), then expenses.
- Rebuild your best sellers. Start with the ten products that make most of your revenue. Each takes minutes once the ingredients are in, and it is the step that makes costing and margins work.
- Take new orders in ibakepro from a set date. Every order with a future event date should already be in ibakepro by then.
- Send customers the new order link and update the link in your Instagram bio, website and email signature.
What moves, and what you rebuild
| Moves by CSV | Rebuilt in ibakepro |
|---|---|
| Customers and their contact details | Products, sizes and flavour options |
| Upcoming orders (and recent history) | Recipes and components |
| Ingredients and supplies | Website and storefront |
| Expenses | Automation workflows and email templates |
Products are rebuilt because in ibakepro a product is built from components and components from ingredients, so a supplier price change flows through to every cost and allergen declaration. A flat product list from another system cannot carry that. If you are moving off spreadsheets rather than other software, see getting off spreadsheets.
How the import handles a messy file
Upload the file as it came out of your old system. ibakepro proposes which of your columns goes where, using Choux, its AI, for headers it does not recognise, at no credit cost, and shows every row as it will land before anything is written. Rows with a problem, such as a date it cannot read, are set aside with the reason so you can fix them in bulk or skip them. There is also a standard template import that uses no AI at all.
Imports add records and skip duplicates rather than overwriting them, so running the same file twice is safe. On Essentials, imported orders count toward the plan's 100-order allowance, so bring across upcoming orders and recent history rather than ten years of it.
A 14-day trial gives you time to do the whole move before you pay. Plans and prices are in what does bakery software cost.