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The Café Account That Taught Me How to Invoice a Bakery

By Diane Kowalski, Bakery Owner — Portland, OR

I opened Honeycomb Bakery in 2016 out of a commercial kitchen I was renting by the hour. For the first two years, everything was retail — farmers markets, pop-ups, a small pre-order system through Instagram. Then in late 2018 a café four blocks from my house asked if I’d supply their pastry case.

Eight croissants per day. Twelve muffins. Six scones. They wanted delivery Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They had about twenty thousand dollars a month in foot traffic.

I said yes immediately.

Three months later, I had a spreadsheet problem, two missed payments, and a first-week invoice the café bookkeeper described as “just a photo of your logo with a number.” I’d built a retail business. I had no idea how to bill wholesale.

The Wholesale Account Invoice Problem

The café’s bookkeeper was right. My invoicing was embarrassing. I was texting her a total at the end of the week, and she needed a formal invoice with line items, a PO number, and an invoice number she could track.

I also didn’t understand how net-30 worked in practice. They’d said “net-30” at the start, which I understood to mean they’d pay within thirty days. What I didn’t understand was that the clock started when they received the invoice — and if I didn’t send the invoice until the end of the month, the thirty days started then.

I was invoicing weekly deliveries all at once at the end of the month, then waiting another thirty days. My cash was tied up for sixty days on supplies I’d bought and delivered six weeks earlier.

The café account was $2,800/month. With my broken billing cycle, I was perpetually owed one to two months of revenue. The first time I actually mapped it out, I was sitting on $4,900 in outstanding receivables from one account.

I fixed three things: invoice frequency, invoice format, and net terms.

The Weekly Wholesale Invoice

Invoice Flow app invoice editor of a bakery — a 3-tier wedding cake, tasting box, venue delivery and stand rental with event date, servings and design in custom fields
The cake, the tasting box, delivery, the stand — with the wedding date and 50% deposit on record.

After the café problem, I moved wholesale accounts to weekly invoicing with net-7 terms. Net-7 is unusual for wholesale — most bakeries invoice monthly with net-30. But for a small business with daily production costs, waiting thirty days was unsustainable.

Wholesale Bakery — Weekly Invoice — [Account Name] — Week of [Date]:

Account Details:

Deliveries This Week:

The itemization by delivery day was my café bookkeeper’s specific request — she needed to reconcile deliveries against her receiving log. Once I started matching her format, invoice disputes dropped to zero.

Custom Cake and Special Order Invoices

Custom orders — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, specialty baked goods — require a deposit structure. The materials and labor go in before the order is picked up.

Custom Order — [Client Name] — [Pickup/Delivery Date]:

The deposit for custom orders is essential. I once made a $380 custom birthday cake — fondant decorations, specific color scheme, the client’s child’s name in script — and the client didn’t show up. The deposit I’d collected was $100 at the time. I lost $280 worth of materials and a full Saturday of labor.

Now, custom orders are 50% non-refundable at confirmation. The deposit covers materials. The balance is collected at pickup.

Corporate and Event Pre-Orders

Invoice Flow app documents of a bakery — a wedding cake on deposit, a wholesale café order, a paid corporate office-cake program and a paid delivery
Custom cakes, café wholesale, corporate programs — every order type on record.

Offices, event coordinators, and venue contacts often place large pre-orders for meetings, office breakfasts, and catered events.

Corporate Pastry Pre-Order — [Company Name] — [Date]:

Corporate pre-orders are where PO numbers matter. A real estate firm I supply for monthly agent breakfasts had me wait eight weeks for a $460 payment once because I didn’t have a PO number on the invoice. Their accounts payable system couldn’t process it. Now I ask for the PO at order time.

Farmers Market and Retail Sales Receipts

Farmers market sales are cash and card — no invoicing needed. But some customers want a receipt for expense reporting or business tax purposes.

Retail Sales Receipt — Honeycomb Bakery — [Date]:

InvoiceFlow generates these quickly when customers ask — a professional receipt with my business name and contact, sent to their email.

Subscription and Standing Order Invoices

Invoice Flow app recurring invoices of a bakery — a weekly café standing order and a monthly artisan bread club subscription
The café's weekly order and the bread club bill themselves — you bake, not chase.

Some clients place the same order every week — a restaurant that orders bread twice a week, a household that subscribes to a weekly pastry box. For these, I use a recurring invoice.

Weekly Pastry Box Subscription — [Client Name] — Week of [Date]:

The subscription model took me two years to try, and I wish I’d started sooner. Thirty-one active subscriptions at an average of $52/week = $1,612/week in guaranteed revenue, regardless of weather or market day.

The Business Eight Years In

Current revenue breakdown:

When I was selling at farmers markets only, I was making about $2,800/month. Wholesale accounts changed the floor. Subscriptions changed the ceiling.

What InvoiceFlow Does for Bakeries

Bakery billing spans wholesale weekly invoices with delivery-day itemization, custom cake deposits with cancellation policies, corporate pre-orders with PO fields, retail receipts, and recurring subscription billing. InvoiceFlow handles all of these from one Android app — weekly recurring invoices for wholesale accounts, deposit tracking for custom orders, and PO fields for corporate clients.

Download InvoiceFlow. Build the wholesale invoice template with delivery-day itemization and net-7 terms. Set up subscription billing with weekly auto-invoicing. Add the deposit and cancellation policy to custom order invoices. The café account that pays net-7 is worth more than a month of market tables — and it starts with a professional invoice.

Diane Kowalski is the owner of Honeycomb Bakery in Portland, Oregon, providing wholesale pastries, custom cakes, subscription boxes, retail market sales, and corporate pre-orders.