The author
Jimenez Julien
Founder and product lead of TieredOrders, published by MLJ, SASU. He writes the software, answers the support mail, and sits on the onboarding calls where bakery price books get typed in.
Why a cake shop needed its own order form
I did not come to bakeries through pastry. I came through a spreadsheet. A friend of the family ran a two person cake shop outside Toulouse, and every January she rebuilt the same workbook: one tab for wedding quotes, one for weekday rounds, one where she tried to keep track of who had paid a deposit and who had promised to. The workbook was not the problem. The problem was that every order started as speech. Somebody said a date, a flavor and a guest count out loud, and from that moment the shop was running on memory.
When I started talking to bakers in the United States, the shape of the trouble was identical and the stakes were higher. A cottage baker in Ohio told me she had rewritten an order four times because the customer changed the filling twice and the pickup once, and each rewrite cost her most of an evening. A storefront in Georgia had taken two large tiered cakes for the same Saturday because two people answered the phone. Nobody in either shop lacked skill. They lacked a place where an order became a fact instead of a conversation.
TieredOrders exists to move that moment earlier. Everything a baker needs before starting work, the date, the servings, the flavor and filling, the finish, the allergens, the pickup or delivery, and the deposit, gets captured in a single pass while the customer is still paying attention. The pricing rules are the baker's own numbers, not a template I invented. My job is to make the questions land in the right order and to keep the form quick enough that a customer standing in a parking lot will finish it.
What working with bakeries taught me
The first thing I got wrong was the calendar. I built it like a booking system, where any open slot could be claimed. Bakers corrected me quickly: a Saturday is not a set of empty hours, it is an oven, a fridge, a decorating table and two pairs of hands. Capacity is measured in tiered cakes, not in minutes. So the calendar was rebuilt around caps that a shop sets itself, and the form now refuses dates that the kitchen cannot physically serve, which turned out to be the feature owners mention most.
The second lesson was about deposits. I assumed bakers wanted a payment feature. What they actually wanted was to stop being the person who has to ask. Putting the deposit at the end of the order, as the natural last step rather than a follow up text on a Thursday night, changed the conversation from chasing money to confirming a booking. That single reordering did more for cash flow in these shops than any report I could have built.
The third lesson was about allergens, and it is the one I take most seriously. A dietary note that lives only in a conversation is a liability. The flag now travels from the customer's checkbox to the printed ticket to the bake sheet, in red, and it cannot be edited away by accident. Bakers do not need to be reminded that this matters. They need a system that does not quietly drop it.
Experience and expertise
- Eleven years building operational software for small businesses that run on appointments, orders and deadlines, most of it for teams of one to twelve people.
- Direct onboarding work with more than four hundred bakery accounts across the United States, from cottage kitchens with a single oven to shops running six locations.
- Hands on knowledge of the numbers this trade lives by: servings per tier size, per serving pricing, upcharges for fondant and sugar flowers, delivery mileage, rush windows and deposit rates.
- Practical experience with the tools bakeries already keep, including QuickBooks Online, Square, Google Calendar and the humble printed ticket taped to a rack.
- Publisher and legal representative of MLJ, SASU, the French company that owns and operates this product.
How this product is built and maintained
Every feature starts with a recorded onboarding call or a support message from a working bakery. If a request cannot be traced to a real order that went wrong, it does not get built. Releases go out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, never on a Friday, because Friday is when a cake shop is least able to absorb a surprise. Anything that touches pricing rules or the production calendar is tested against a set of real order patterns supplied by ten volunteer shops before it ships.
The writing on this site follows the same rule as the software. Numbers quoted here come from account data or from the bakers who agreed to be named, and prices on the pricing section are the prices you will be billed. When a claim stops being true, it gets changed rather than softened. Support mail arrives in one inbox, mine, and is answered within one business day. If something breaks in a way that affects orders, we say so in the account and in an email rather than waiting for anyone to notice.
What I am accountable for is narrow and clear: that an order taken through TieredOrders reaches the kitchen complete, that a deposit taken is a deposit recorded, that a date shown as available is a date the shop can actually bake, and that a bakery can export everything it has put in and walk away at any time without asking permission.
Published articles
Everything below was written for The Cake Board, the TieredOrders magazine for bakeries that take special orders, and published on September 3, 2026.
- How to Structure Cake Order Deposits, Balances and Cancellations
- Buttercream, Fondant and Ganache Compared on Cost, Heat and Labor
- Wedding Cake Delivery Mistakes That Cause Tiers to Collapse
- Allergen Labeling and Cross Contact Rules for Cake Orders
- Costing a Three Tier Wedding Cake From Flour to Delivery
- How Butter, Egg and Cocoa Costs Reach Your Cake Price List
- The Custom Cake Intake Checklist for the First Phone Call
- Cake Serving Counts and Batter Yields by Pan and Tier Size
- Inside a Two Person Cake Shop's Week, Tuesday to Saturday
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com for anything about the product, the pricing, a partnership, or a correction to something on this site. If you are a bakery owner considering the software, say how many custom cakes you take in a week and how you price them today, and the reply will be specific instead of general. You can also start from the request form on the home page.