Five numbers every bakery should track

You do not need a dashboard. These five numbers fit on a sheet of paper by the till, and together they answer most of the questions that matter: what to bake more of, what to cut, and where money quietly leaks.

1. What one item costs to make

Not the price. The cost: ingredients, energy, and a fair share of the labour. Most bakers know this for their flagship product and guess for everything else. Without it, none of the other numbers mean much, because you cannot judge waste until you know what a binned item is worth.

2. Waste rate, per product

Items thrown away divided by items baked, per week. In the bakery sales data we benchmarked, overbaking by around 20 percent was typical, and most of it sat in a handful of products. That is the point of tracking it per product instead of for the whole shop: the shop average hides the two or three items doing the damage.

3. Sell-out time

When a product runs empty, note the clock time. Sold out before 15:00 again and again means you are leaving sales on the table. Never sells out means the bin is eating your margin. This is the cheapest demand signal you can collect, and almost nobody collects it.

4. The weekday spread

For each of your top products, compare the best day of the week with the slowest. If Saturday reliably outsells Tuesday and you bake the same amount on both, you are wasting on Tuesday and losing sales on Saturday at the same time.

5. Your top five products' share of revenue

Add up what your five best sellers bring in and divide by total revenue. The share is usually bigger than expected. Get those five products right first: a perfect plan for something that sells three pieces a day was never going to move the needle.

These are the same numbers MakeBright collects when you log a day, and the math it runs on top of them is what turns a log into a bake plan. But the notebook version works. Five numbers, once a week. Most bakeries never look at any of them.