How I turn Shopify pre-orders into a daily bake sheet

If you run a small bakery on Shopify and take orders for a pickup day, you probably know this evening routine. Export the orders, open a spreadsheet, filter by date, then add up how many loaves, boxes of cookies and cakes in each size you need. Then someone edits an order at 9pm and the sheet is wrong.

Shopify is built around orders. A kitchen works in quantities per day. The gap between those two is the whole problem.

Where the date lives

The first thing to check is where your store saves the pickup or delivery date. It's usually one of these:

• a cart attribute or order note written by a date picker app
• an order metafield
• an order tag like pickup-2026-12-23
• nothing at all, because the customer picked the product called "Saturday pickup"

Open three recent orders and look. If they don't all store the date the same way, that's your first fix, before any tool. Mixed formats ("23/12", "Dec 23", "2026-12-23") are fine as long as you know which ones you have.

What the sheet needs

For each production day you want:

1. Every product and variant, with a total. "Sourdough, large: 34" is useful. "14 orders" is not.
2. Any customisation that changes the work: "no nuts", a cake message, a size.
3. A short list of orders that have no date or an unreadable one. This is the important part. An order with no date doesn't show up on anyone's list, so nobody bakes it, and you find out at pickup.
4. A split by location or pickup/delivery if you have more than one.

Doing it by hand

You can do this with an export and a pivot table: rows are product + variant, columns are dates, values are the sum of quantity. Add a filter for cancelled and refunded orders. Check the "no date" rows by eye every evening. It works. It takes 15 to 30 minutes a day in December, and it breaks every time someone edits an order after the export.

Doing it in an app

I got tired of rebuilding that pivot table, so I built a Shopify app for it, Tikkivo BakeList. You tell it where the date is (field, metafield, tag or a fallback rule), and it shows the bake sheet for any day, totalled by product and variant. Orders without a usable date go into a "needs a production date" box. You can print it or export CSV. Edits and cancellations update the sheet.

There's a free plan for 30 orders a month, which is enough to try it on a real weekend. Paid plans start at $19 a month.

Disclosure: I'm the developer. App Store page: https://apps.shopify.com/tikkivo-bakelist

If your setup stores dates somewhere I haven't listed, tell me in the comments. I'd like to support it.