How MakeBright works

Name, city, and the time you start baking. The city sets your weather and public holidays, both of which feed the forecast, so pick the real one.

Start from the common list and delete anything you do not sell, then add your own. Four fields do real work here, and guessing them wrong quietly distorts every number that follows:

• Batch size — how many come out of one bake. Plans are always rounded up to whole batches, so a batch of 12 means you will never be told to bake 20. Set this to what your tins and oven actually produce.
• Shelf life — how many days it stays saleable. Anything longer than a day carries over instead of being thrown out.
• Category — Daily Fresh for things that must sell today, Multi-Day for things that keep, Occasional for what you bake now and then. This decides whether leftovers count as waste or as tomorrow's stock.
• How many per day — what you normally bake. This is the entire forecast on day one, before there is any sales history to learn from.

All four can be changed later without losing your history.

If you have past sales in a spreadsheet, upload it — you will get useful forecasts far sooner. MakeBright looks for a date column, a product name, and a quantity sold, and will also read waste and sold-out columns if you have them. Column names can be in your own wording. Dates written 03/04 are read as 3 April, not 4 March.

No spreadsheet is fine. Starting from scratch just means the first two weeks lean on what you told us you bake.

Less, Balanced, or More. This sets how much cushion is added above the forecast: Less accepts the odd sell-out to cut waste, More keeps the shelf full and accepts a little more waste. Balanced is the sensible default and you can fine-tune it later in Settings.

Owners can invite people from Settings. A baker can log the day and use the plan; a viewer can look but not change anything. Only the owner can invite.

Square can sync sales automatically, so you do not have to type them. Without it you log by hand, which is perfectly workable — it is a minute a day.

Open Plan. Each product shows one number: how many to bake. Tap the small ? beside any product to see exactly how that number was reached.

For anything that keeps, MakeBright asks what is left from previous days and subtracts it. Skip this and it assumes an empty shelf, which means baking more than you need. It is the highest-value ten seconds in the app.

Print kitchen ticket gives you the list on paper, which is usually easier than a phone with flour on it.

Tap a quantity to change it. You know about the coach party on Saturday and the forecast does not. Overrides apply to that day only and do not upset the learning.

For each product, enter what you made and what was left over:

• Daily Fresh and Occasional — one box, Unsold. Those are thrown away, so they count as waste.
• Multi-Day — two boxes. On shelf is what is still good and will be there tomorrow. Binned: what went stale and got thrown out. Only Binned counts as waste, and On shelf is subtracted from tomorrow's plan.
• If something ran out before closing, tap All sold, rather than typing zero. It records that you could have sold more, so the forecast knows not to keep leaving you short. Typing zero only means “none left”.

Closed today? Use We were closed instead of logging zeros — a day of zeros would teach it that nobody wanted anything.

Your home screen lists days you have not logged; tap one to fill it in. Late is much better than never — a gap simply teaches it nothing, and the numbers stay coarser for longer.

Insights shows waste as a percentage, what that waste cost, and how many times you sold out, over 7, 30, or 90 days. “Where waste happens” ranks your products by the money involved, which is usually more useful than the count. You can export the raw numbers as a CSV.

The Week view on the Plan page shows all seven days at once — handy for ordering flour. For items that keep, later days are projections that assume you bake what is suggested, so treat them as a guide and confirm your real shelf each morning.

Tell Schedule when you will be shut or on shorter hours. Closed days are left out of the forecast entirely, so a Christmas break does not look like a collapse in demand.

Add new lines whenever you like. When you stop making something, archive it rather than deleting it — archiving keeps the history that your other forecasts may lean on.

New cafes start in shadow mode: MakeBright watches and suggests, and you carry on as usual. It counts your first 14 logged days, which is roughly when forecasts settle down. Switching to active is a manual choice in Settings — nothing changes until you decide it has earned it.