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The Five-Orders-a-Week Problem

You started your baking business because you love baking. The first few orders were fun. A friend wanted cupcakes for a birthday. A neighbor ordered cookies for a school event. You tracked everything in your head or a quick text thread. Then word spread. Now you have 15 orders a week coming through Instagram DMs, Facebook messages, texts, and email. You copy details into a Google Sheet. You check your calendar to see if you can fit a three-tier cake on Saturday. You send a Venmo request and hope the customer pays before pickup day. You forget to follow up on an unpaid invoice because it was buried in a text thread. This is the breaking point every growing home baker hits. The orders are there. The systems are not.

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Why Generic Tools Fall Short

You have probably tried a few things. A Square store. A Shopify page. A generic invoicing app. They work for retail shops and online stores, but they were not built for custom orders, production planning, or cottage food businesses. They do not understand sell units like dozens or half dozens. They cannot answer “do I have room to take another order this weekend?” They do not connect your recipes to your ingredient costs. They do not generate a production checklist for bake day. You end up duct-taping three or four tools together and still doing half the work manually. Order management for home bakers needs something purpose-built.

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What Makes Knead Different

Knead is cottage food business software built around the workflow you already follow. It covers every step from order request to payment, with capacity planning at the center. Here is how it works:
  • The Board is your public order form. Share the link on Instagram, your website, or in a text. Customers browse your products, pick a date, and submit a request. No more back-and-forth DMs about what you offer.
  • The Counter is your dashboard. Every new order, pending payment, and upcoming deadline shows up here. Open it each morning and you know exactly what needs your attention.
  • The Sweet Spot is your calendar and capacity planner. It answers the most important question in your business: “Should I take this order?” See what you have committed to and how much room is left — in seconds, not guesswork.
  • The Pantry tracks your ingredients and costs. Link recipes to products and Knead calculates your true cost per item. Know your margins before you set your price.
  • The Pass turns accepted orders into production checklists. On bake day, open The Pass and work through each item. No sticky notes. No forgotten orders.
Bakery capacity planning is not a bonus feature here. It is the foundation. Every order flows through your capacity view so you never overcommit and never leave money on the table.

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Built by a Baker, for Bakers

Knead was not designed in a conference room. Beth, Knead’s co-founder, runs her own cottage food business — Southern Peach Pastries. She bakes, takes orders, manages ingredients, and invoices customers every week. Every feature in Knead comes from real baking days, real customer conversations, and real Saturday-morning production sprints. When a baker says “I need a faster way to handle this,” the person listening is a baker too.

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Home Baker Invoicing Without the Hassle

Getting paid should not require chasing customers through text messages. With Knead, you create an invoice in one tap, send it by email, and your customer pays online through Stripe. Payment status updates automatically. You always know who has paid and who has not. No more Venmo screenshots. No more “I will pay you at pickup.” No more forgetting who owes what.

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Ready to Try It?

If you are managing your baking business across DMs, spreadsheets, and memory, Knead brings it all into one place. Read the Welcome to Knead guide to see how the pieces fit together, or sign up at kneadapp.co and get started today.
Still need help? Contact us