02/07/2026
Anyone else drive the struggle bus their first time using Hotplate? 🤦♀️
I have faith that I'll figure it out soon, but WOW.
Set up was mostly typical compared to a few other ops systems I've used, so no real issues there. Orders came through just fine. It took me a while to figure out how to navigate that as they continued to come in though, because the flow just doesn't make much sense on that end.
Then I could see that it started to list individual items from the orders, and according to the pick up day. Okay, great, that's very helpful....
THEN I noticed that the items for each order weren't listed together as more orders came in. It was just... here's Saturday pickup items, then here's Sunday pickup items. So like... 8:30 order item, 9:30 order item, back to 8:30 order item.
THEN I noticed that the cupcakes didn't tell me the flavor of the icing on the prep page, but it DID notate that the customer chose our Bourbon Vanilla extract for that item. Nor did it mention that the customers wanted their loaf breads sliced (but one it notated the extra honey request).
Then I finally found the "package" section, where it put all the items BACK together for each order, which is where I noticed really late last night that the breads were to be sliced (it also didn't say that anywhere on the initial individual order when it came in, or I would have noticed it). 😒
Maybe it's because I was using my phone and not my laptop. I don't know. Anyway, I reached out to a good friend that knows the system better than I do. She says hers doesn't do that, so we're definitely chatting later about it.
It was really just one of those DAYS the last few days yall!
It put me SO far behind having to navigate back and forth to get all the needed info to get these orders together. 🤦♀️
I have faith I'll figure out how to work it better in the coming weeks, and get a routine down. I do appreciate that it groups thing together, where you can check items off as they're complete.
Anyway, receipts in the photos. I just VERY much appreciate 2 of my ladies this morning for being VERY forgiving on my cupcakes and giving me some grace to figure this out. (There was also a random debacle with the actual icing for them 🤦♀️)
Thank GOD I caught the rest.
The hilarious part is that the new items on the menu... man they turned out FANTASTIC. I couldn't be happier. I was ONLY THE most basic stuff that gave me the biggest headaches!
Fixing it and moving on, and coming up with a better game plan for next week's orders.
