The order on the back of a receipt
Size, flavor, filling, inscription, pickup time. One of them is always missing, so you call back, leave a message, wait, and start the cake a day late.
About $70 of decorating time per rewriteCustom cake order intake
Take the whole cake order while the customer is still on the phone.
TieredOrders turns your price book into an order form that asks about servings, flavor, filling, allergens and pickup, then takes the deposit on the spot. The date lands on your production calendar with the decorating hours already blocked.
- Running in 412 US bakeries
- Deposits on 94% of accepted orders
- Live before your next Saturday rush
Order 4172Sat, May 16
Three tiers, 84 servings
Deposit $145 receivedEvery order you take twice
An order taken on the fly is an order you will rebuild later
The call comes in at 3:10 on a Friday, mid batch, with the mixer running and a sheet cake in the oven. You write four words on whatever paper is closest, and the other eleven things you needed are gone.
Nut free, said once, over a mixer
Dietary notes arrive in conversation and die there. When the allergen never reaches the bake sheet, you find out at pickup, and the whole cake goes in the trash.
One remake: $185 and a Saturday morningDeposits chased on a Thursday night
You start the sugar work on trust, then send the third polite text about the 50 percent. Some of those cakes get picked up. Some of them sit in the case.
$1,400 uncollected at any given momentTwo four tier cakes, one Saturday
Both were promised in a good mood. Neither knew about the other. Now one bride is getting a phone call you will remember for a long time.
1 canceled order, 1 review you keepSmall bakeries do not lose money on ingredients. They lose it on the half hour between a customer saying what they want and a decorator knowing what to build.
From first message to bake sheet
Four steps, and the ticket is already complete
Nothing here asks you to change how you bake. It asks you to write down what you already charge, once, and then lets the form do the asking.
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Write your price book once
Tier sizes and the servings each one gives, base price per serving, flavor and filling upcharges, buttercream against fondant, sugar flowers, delivery zones and the rush window. Change a number later and every new quote follows it.
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Send one link instead of playing phone tag
Text it, put it on your profile, pin it to the counter with a QR code. The customer picks a date that is genuinely open, sizes the cake by guest count, and sees the price move as they choose.
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Take the deposit while the order is warm
The last screen asks for 50 percent or your flat booking fee. A receipt goes to the customer, the balance due date is set, and a reminder goes out four days before pickup without you touching it.
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Let the calendar hold the week
Bake day, decorating hours and the pickup slot appear on the production calendar. When Saturday reaches the cap you set, that date quietly stops being offered to anyone else.
What is in the order form
Built around the way cake orders actually arrive
Six things every custom order needs, handled in the order a baker would ask for them.
Servings math inside the price
Enter a guest count and the form proposes the tier stack that feeds it, then prices it from your per serving rate. No more sizing a cake in your head while somebody waits on the line.
Allergens that reach the bake sheet
Nut free, gluten free, dairy free and egg free are checkboxes on the customer side and a red banner on the printed ticket. The flag stays on the order through prep, bake, fill and box.
Deposits taken at the end of the form
Set a percentage or a flat booking fee and the customer pays it before the order is confirmed. Balance reminders send themselves, and every payment is stamped on the order record.
A production calendar with caps
Say that a Saturday holds six tiered cakes and twelve rounds, and the form respects it. Vacation weeks, wholesale runs and school fundraisers block the date before a customer can claim it.
Tastings, consults and box pickups
Sell a tasting box or a 30 minute consultation as its own bookable slot, with the fee credited to the cake if the order goes ahead. Consults land on the same calendar as bake days, so nobody double books the decorating table.
Delivery zones, setup and stairs
Price delivery by zone or by mile, add a setup fee for stacking on site, and flag venues with a service elevator or a flight of stairs. The driver gets the address, the window and the contact on one card.
What changes by the third Saturday
The numbers bakers report back to us
These come from 412 accounts, measured against the four weeks before they moved their intake onto a form.
Back per custom order
The call back, the second call back and the retyping all disappear. The order arrives written, priced and dated, so intake is a glance at a ticket instead of a conversation you have twice.
Of accepted orders carry a deposit
The deposit is the last step of the form, not a text message you send later. Bakers who used to collect on pickup now start decorating with the money already in the account.
More quotes become cakes
A priced answer inside the hour beats a promise to get back to someone tomorrow. When the customer can see the number and pay right there, fewer inquiries drift off to the bakery down the road.
Double booked Saturdays
The capacity cap is enforced by the form, not by memory. Once the tiered slots for a date are gone, that date is closed to new tiered orders and stays open only for what you can still bake.
Bakers who quote every day
Three shops, three very different order books
I used to take orders on the back of a receipt roll while the mixer ran. Now the form asks the questions I always forget: servings, the filling, whether anyone at the party is nut free. Last month I booked 41 cakes and every one of them had a deposit on it before I picked up a pencil.
The capacity cap is the part I would not give back. Saturdays are set at six tiered cakes and twelve rounds, and the form simply stops offering the date once the oven is spoken for. We stopped saying yes to work we could not decorate, and my two decorators stopped staying until nine on Fridays.
Wedding quotes used to sit in my texts for three days. Now an inquiry comes in fully priced, I adjust the sugar flower line, and the couple pays half within the hour. We booked 52 wedding cakes this spring against 34 last spring, with the same two people in the kitchen.
18,400Custom cakes scheduled last year
$2.1MDeposits collected for bakeries in 2025
4.9 of 5Average rating from account owners
Plans
One kitchen, one shop, or six of them
Priced in US dollars, billed monthly, and you can cancel at any time from the account screen. No setup fee, no contract, no charge per order.
Home Baker
Cottage kitchens and one person shops
$19/mo
Billed monthly in USD
- 25 custom orders a month
- One order form with your price book
- Servings calculator and flavor upcharges
- Allergen and dietary flags on every ticket
- Deposit capture and emailed receipts
- Single baker production calendar
- Email support, answered within one business day
Bakery
A storefront with a decorating team
$49/mo
Billed monthly in USD
- Unlimited custom orders
- Up to five staff logins with roles
- Capacity caps by date and by cake type
- Tasting boxes and paid consultation slots
- Delivery zones, mileage and setup fees
- Balance reminders and rush window rules
- QuickBooks Online and calendar sync
- Phone and email support six days a week
Multi Baker
Several locations or a shared kitchen
$99/mo
Billed monthly in USD
- Everything in the Bakery plan
- Up to six locations under one account
- A separate price book per shop
- Move an order between kitchens in one click
- Standing wholesale and corporate templates
- Group reporting on deposits and lead times
- Data export and webhook access
- A named account contact for onboarding
Every plan is billed monthly and can be cancelled at any time. Your order history, customer list and calendar stay exportable for as long as the account is open.
Questions from the kitchen
Asked by bakers before they switch their intake
Plans are $19, $49 and $99 a month, billed monthly in US dollars. One order is one cake ticket, whether that ticket is a six inch smash cake or a four tier wedding cake with a groom's cake beside it. Quotes and consultations that never turn into a booking do not count against the Home Baker limit of 25 orders a month. The Bakery and Multi Baker plans have no order cap at all.
Most bakeries have a live form the same afternoon they sign up. The real work is entering your price book: tier sizes and servings, flavor and filling upcharges, buttercream against fondant, delivery zones and rush fees. We do that with you on a 45 minute call and you approve every number before anything goes to a customer. Shops with a long specialty menu usually spread it across two sittings.
Order records and customer contact details sit in your account on servers in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest. Card numbers never touch our systems: deposits run through a licensed payment processor that returns a token, so what we hold is the receipt and the amount. You can export every order to CSV whenever you want, and you can delete a customer record on request. We do not sell data and we do not run advertising trackers on the order form.
Yes to all three. Deposits and balances post to QuickBooks Online as invoices and payments, so nobody is retyping Saturday on Monday morning. Bake days, decorating blocks and pickup times publish to Google Calendar or Apple Calendar through a subscription link, and counter sales rung up in Square can be matched back to an order ticket. There is also a plain webhook and a CSV export if your bookkeeper prefers a spreadsheet.
Every plan is month to month, and you can cancel from the account screen without a phone call or a fee. The account stays open until the end of the period you already paid for. Before it closes you can export the full order history, the customer list and the calendar as CSV and ICS files. We hold the data for 30 days after cancellation in case you come back, then it is deleted for good.
The form is not trying to price the artwork. It prices the parts that are already settled in your shop: servings by tier size, the flavors and fillings you charge more for, the finish, the delivery mileage and the rush window. Anything genuinely one off arrives as a quote request with reference photos attached, and you set the final figure in a single field before the deposit link goes out. Bakers tell us roughly 8 in 10 tickets price themselves, and the other 2 land with better information than a voicemail ever gave them.
The Cake Board
The questions bakers ask us on a call, written down properly
The Cake Board is our magazine for shops that take special orders. Nine long form guides on holding a date with a retainer, costing a tier down to the butter, labeling the nine allergens correctly, and getting a finished cake to a venue standing up.
practical guide
How to Structure Cake Order Deposits, Balances and Cancellations
A retainer that holds a date is not the same as a deposit you may have to give back. Here is how custom cake bakers set nonrefundable retainers, balance due dates and cancellation windows that actually hold.
comparison
Buttercream, Fondant and Ganache Compared on Cost, Heat and Labor
Fondant costs more per covered tier than buttercream but survives an August tent. A working comparison of the three standard finishes on ingredient cost, labor hours, heat tolerance and on site repair.
mistakes to avoid
Wedding Cake Delivery Mistakes That Cause Tiers to Collapse
Collapsed wedding cakes usually fail for the same handful of reasons: no internal support, warm buttercream, a sloped car floor, and a cake stacked at the shop instead of on the venue table.
Read all nine articles in The Cake Board
Every figure quoted comes from a real order book or a published federal rule, so you can check it against your own invoices before you change a price.
Tell us about your Saturdays
Send us one weekend of your order book and we will build the form around it
Write down how you price a cake and how many you can decorate in a week. We will come back with the intake form set up for your shop, your tier sizes and your delivery zones, and walk you through it live.