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Pricing Margin Alerts

When an ingredient cost change pushes any product below your target margin, BakeOnyx alerts you on the dashboard and via email — Growth+ only.

Growth Email SettingsProducts

What It Does

Bakers miss margin erosion because costs creep up one ingredient at a time. This feature catches the exact moment an ingredient cost change bumps a product below your target margin — before you've baked dozens of that product at a loss.

Tier: Growth+ only. Essentials bakeries don't see the banner, the digest section, or the alert email.

How Margin Is Calculated

For every active product with a positive price and positive cost:

margin % = (basePrice − cost) / basePrice × 100

Products where basePrice = 0 or cost = 0 are skipped — we can't fairly judge them.

Setting Your Target

Default target is 60%. Adjust at Settings → Post-Order Growth Emails in the "Pricing margin alerts" card. Valid range: 0–100.

  • Industry norm for bakeries: 60–70% gross margin
  • Premium / custom work: 70–80%+ is typical
  • Wholesale / commodity: 40–50% is more common

What Triggers a Check

Editing any ingredient's cost per unit via the Ingredients page fires a cascade:

  1. The ingredient's new cost propagates to all recipes that use it (Recipe.cost recomputes)
  2. Product costs that depend on those recipes recompute (Product.cost)
  3. A margin check runs — if any active product is now below your target, a job is enqueued
  4. At most one alert email per day per bakery is sent (dedup), regardless of how many ingredients you edited

Three Surfaces

1. Dashboard Banner

An amber banner at the top of your dashboard shows the count: "X products below your Y% margin target". Click through to your products page. Dismiss the banner for the current session; it reappears if the count changes.

2. Weekly Digest Section

The Monday digest includes your top 3 below-margin products with current margin percentage. Only appears if any are below target.

3. Email to You

Sent after ingredient cost changes that pushed products below target. Lists the top 10 offenders with price and margin. Includes a "Review products" CTA to the dashboard.

Turn Off the Email, Keep the Banner

The email toggle is independent from the surface visibility. Turn "Email me when products drop below target" off and you'll still see the dashboard banner and digest section — just without the extra email.

Preview Before Going Live

Click the Preview button in settings to email yourself a rendered sample of the alert. Uses real below-target products when any exist, or 3 synthetic samples otherwise. Subject is prefixed [Preview].

Tip: after a major ingredient price update (butter seasonally goes up, flour contract renewal), edit one ingredient first. Watch for the alert. You'll get a clear picture of which of your products are sensitive to that ingredient's price.

What's Not a Trigger

Purchase order receiving does not currently update Ingredient.costPerUnit. If you receive an ingredient at a different price than your last-set cost, you'll need to update the ingredient manually for the margin alert to fire. This is intentional — auto-updating costs from PO receiving is a bigger project (the received price might be a one-off promo, not your new steady-state cost).

Debugging Why an Alert Didn't Fire

Ask yourself in order:

  1. Is your bakery on Growth tier or higher?
  2. Did you save the ingredient cost change successfully?
  3. Is the affected product active (isActive = true)?
  4. Do the product and recipe have a non-zero cost? (Costs of 0 are excluded.)
  5. Was the actual margin below your target? (If target is 60% and the new margin is 61%, no alert.)
  6. Have you already received an alert today? (Dedup is per UTC day.)

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