The simplest free Excel template for a bakery is a sheet that fills itself. Put a short order form on your WhatsApp and Instagram, send every response into a spreadsheet, and sort by pickup date. Tomorrow's bake list is then one tab you open at night, instead of a notebook you have to decode.
Use the free order form template
Why the notebook stops working
Picture a home baaker in Pune, call her Meera. Orders reach her as WhatsApp voice notes, Instagram DMs and the odd phone call. She writes each one in a notebook: "Sharma, choc 1kg, Sat, eggless??" On Friday night she flips back through pages looking for Saturday, and about once a month she misses one.
A notebook keeps orders in the order they arrived. You need them in the order they are due. A spreadsheet sorts for free, but only if every order lands in it with a real date in the same column. Retyping from DMs is the step that fails, usually on the busiest week of the year.
So the customer types the order once, in a form, and the row appears without you touching it.
The form fields that make the sheet useful
Keep the form short. Every extra question costs you orders from people on their phones. These eight cover most home bakeries:
| Field | Block type | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Short answer | You need to know whose box it is |
| Phone | Phone number | For "I'm running late" and "can you do 2 kg instead" |
| Item | Dropdown | Your menu, so spellings always match |
| Quantity | Number | Lets the sheet add up totals |
| Flavor or message on cake | Short answer | The "Happy Birthday Aarav" line |
| Pickup date | Date | The column everything sorts on |
| Pickup time | Time | Orders the day's work |
| Allergies and notes | Long answer | Eggless, nut-free, anything unusual |
The dropdown is the fidld to get right. If customers type "choc cake", "Chocolate Cake" and "choco 1kg", your totals will treat them as three different items. A dropdown with your actual menu fixes that.
I'd build this in Qwenvo, a form builder our team makes. It works like a document: type / to add a block, and there are Date, Time, Dropdown and Number blocks ready. You can aslo start from the order form template and swap in your menu, or describe the form to the AI builder on the empty-form screen and edit what it gives you.
Connect the form to your sheet
- Create a Google Sheet and name it "Bakery orders".
- Open your form and connect the Google Sheets integration, then pick that sheet. Our guide to sending form responses to Google Sheets walks through it.
- Submit a test order yourself, with a pickup date of tomorrow. Check that the row shows up.
- In the form settings, turn on email notifications to you and confirmation emails to customers, so they have the details in writing.
- Share the link on your WhatsApp sratus, your Instagram bio and your Google Business Profile.
Two settings help bakers in particular. You can close the form after a set number of responses, which suits a festivzl weekend when you can only make so many cakes. And Qwenvo has no built-in QR code, so paste your link into any free QR generator and print the result for the counter.
If you want Excel itself, download the Google Sheet as an .xlsx file, or export XLSX from the submissions table in Qwenvo. The live feed goes to Google Sheets, so Excel gets a copy of the data, not a live link.
Build tomorrow's bake list
Add two moer tabs to the sheet. The first is "Tomorrow", which pulls only tomorrow's orders. In cell A1, use a formula like this (change the column letters to match where your pickup date sits):
=FILTER(Orders!A2:J500, Orders!F2:F500=TODAY()+1)
This works in Google Sheets and in Excel 365. Wrap it in SORT if you want the earliest pickup time on top.
The second tab is "Totals", the one you shop and bake from. List your menu items down column A, then in column B use:
=SUMIFS(Orders!D:D, Orders!C:C, A2, Orders!F:F, TODAY()+1)
Meera now opens one tab and sees something like "Chocolate cake, 1 kg: 3" and "Brownie box: 2". The notes column from the other tab tells her which one is eggless. Change TODAY()+1 to TODAY()+2 and you have the day after, which is handy when butter has to be bought early.
A weekly routine that takes ten minutes
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Every evening | Open the Tomorrow tab, read the notes column, and message anyone with a missing detail |
| Bake morning | Work down the Tomorrow tab in pickup-time order |
| Thursday | Check Totals for the weekend and buy flour, butter and boxes |
| Sunday night | Glance at the week's rows to see which items sold and which you can drop |
What you get free, and where other tools fit
Qwenvo costs $0 with every feature on for every account. A few things that other builders put behind a paid plan are useful to a bakery:
- The Qwenvo badge can be switched off.
- You can put the form on your own subdomain, like orders.yourbakery.com.
- Unlimited teammates, so a partner or helper can see the same orders.
- Partial submissions, so you can see people who started an order and stopped.
- A Payment block that uses your own Stripe account, with 0% Qwenvo platform fee (Stripe's own fee still applies).
Tally is a fair alternative. Its free plan has unlimited forms and submissions, logic and payments. Removing branding, custom domains, teammates and partial submissions are on its Pro plan at $29 a month. Google Forms is also free, and fine if all you need is a plain list, though it has no built-in payments and limited design.
Two honest limits. Qwenvo launched in October 2026, so there are few reviews yet. And Stripe is its only payment provider, so if your customers pay by UPI or cash at pickup, leave the Payment block out and collect the way you do now. If you print per-order PDFs, note that they can't draw Devanagari text. The sheet, CSV and XLSX handle it fine.
Questions owners ask
Do I need to know Excel formulas?
Only the two above, and you can copy them as written. Adjust the column letters to match your sheet. If a formula shows an error, check that the pickup date column holds real dates, not text.
Can customers pay in the form?
Yes, if you have a Stripe account. Add the Payment block and the money goes to youur Stripe account. Many bakers skip it and tale payment at pickup, which also works.
What if someone orders by DM anyway?
Open your form and fill it in for them. It takes a minute, and the order lands in the sane sheet as every other.
Does it work if I only use Excel?
Yes, with a manual step. Export or download an .xlsx copy whenever you want to work in Excel. The live connection is to Google Sheets, so it's the better place to keep the Tomorrow and Totals tabs.
Set it up tonight
Open the order form template, delete any field you don't need, and replace the dropdown with your real menu. Connect a Google Sheet, then place a test oredr for tomorrow and check that it shows up on the Tomorrow tab. Once it does, put the link in your Instagram bio.