Bakeries - Managing pre-orders for holidays?

[jchung2181]

I'm reaching out to the community in hopes someone has found a work-around to manage holiday pre-orders (or really any orders that are scheduled for future pick-up).  We are a bakery and have been using Square Register for years fo day to day in-store transactions but still hand write order slips and manually enter them in excel because I cannot find an efficient way to track, manage, and export orders from Square.  We would love to be able to offer online ordering, or even use the Schedule Later feature from the POS but without an option to export, sort, and filter the orders, as well as print them out to attach to boxes or bags, hand-writing is still more effective.  Has anyone found a way to effeciently manage pre-orders through Square?  

I've tried creating an online store to do this but the back-end reporting is essentially useless for production purposes.  During Thanksgiving we offer a limited menu of items that can be pre-ordered for pick up on the two days before Thanksgiving (Tues and Wed).  Historically, we typically have approximately 1,300-1,500 separate Thanksgiving orders (with multiple items in each order, so thousands of items are being produced) being picked up for those two days.  For example, I need to know a breakdown of all the pie flavors that are on order by day (i.e. 750 Apple pies, 600 Blueberry, being picked up on Wed) in order to give our bakers a production sheet so they know how many to make for each day.  Currently, I see no way of totaling the item quantities on pre-order or creating any report that would help aggregate or sort the data.  In addition to our "back-end/production" reporting, I also need a report that contains all of the order information for customer pick-up (basically more of a "front of house" report).  Customer name and contact info, items and quantities ordered, etc.  Is anyone in a similar situation?  Any solutions?  It seems Square has not yet implemented a feature that addresses this issue and I'm looking for any work-arounds or advice to avoid another holiday taking manual orders!  Thanks in advance!

[Donnie-M]

@jchung2181 I can offer a little info on some things we have found.  It is a pain currently to manage multiple thanksgiving pickup orders.

Currently you can use the open checks and can pull an item sales report on the open tickets from the dashboard so you could have total items needed that were sold (especially if you are doing pick ups on 1 or 2 days).  This is a good way to get counts of what you have to produce.

This does not fix the due by "day of" that you are needing.  You can do a website and change the prep time to days/weeks in advance so that the pickup time will fall on a certain day.  This could let you organize the tickets based on pick up time in the order manager.  

I could see the online site working and just pulling the sales report for those 2 days...you could look at making a complete set of your items and putting them in a category called Tuesday Pickup and Wednesday Pickup and have the customer choose the category first they want to order from and just tag every item with a T or W

Tuesday Pickup

Blueberry Pie - Tuesday

Pumpkin Pie - Tuesday

Turkey Breast - Tuesday

Wednesday Pickup

Blueberry Pie - Wednesday

Pumpkin Pie - Wednesday

Turkey Breast - Wednesday

You could easily pull item reports for production purposes for these .  We mass produce our items and then "pack" the orders for pickup using the limited menu method.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

[jchung2181]

Appreciate the insight, Donnie!  I'll have to test out some of your suggestions!

[Lima]

Definitely something that would be game changer for bakery business. 

We had a developer develop an backhouse app where we could enter customer info, date of order and items ordered. It would print order for that day  with order number only for that day etc. 

Only report we need is production for that day where it shows quantity off ordered items from all orders that day.

Developer changed job and he isn't interested in developing more.

I wish square can do anything like this because I would pay for that feature monthly.