Cost management
A system for bakeries that keeps growing — not a closed product

Know what you will earn this month — on the 12th

A controlling system for bakeries that joins your sales forecast to your costs. Instead of waiting for the period to close, you see the projected month-end result and know what you can still do about it.

The income statement arrives too late

You learn how May went in June. By then it is too late to do anything about it — the costs were incurred, the sales happened, and the decisions that mattered were made in May without those numbers.

In a bakery it is harder still, because revenue swings day to day while a large share of costs is fixed. A weak week in the retail chains is not only lower revenue — it is also the ingredient, production and transport cost that has already gone out.

Questions that are hard to answer mid-month:

  • At today's rate of sales, will we hit the plan?
  • Which cost grew, before it grew enough to show up in the accounts?
  • Where did the payroll overrun come from, and will it repeat next month?
  • Sales are below plan — which costs can I still stop this period?

Three things that have to meet

1

The sales forecast

Our model predicts demand by store, product and day — for company stores, in-store bakeries, retail chains and individual customers. It is the same forecast that drives production.

2

Your cost structure

Costs pulled automatically from your ERP and assigned to categories and carriers: management, transport (by vehicle), company stores, production per plant, wholesale, financial costs.

3

Joining one to the other

The volume forecast translates into revenue and into ingredient, production and transport cost. Fixed costs are forecast separately — from history, contracts and the staffing plan. Together they give a projected result for the month, updated daily.

This is the edge an ordinary report cannot give you. A spreadsheet or a BI module shows the past. We know future sales — and most costs in a bakery follow from them.

Every new tool makes the previous ones more accurate

We are not building separate programmes. We are building one system for bakeries that we keep extending with new modules — and each one brings fresh data into the shared base.

Demand prediction, cost controlling and route planning all draw on the same set of information about your company. That is why every new element does not merely add a feature: it raises the accuracy of all the others.

What that looks like in practice

Demand prediction → Cost management

Once we know how much you will sell in each channel, we also know the revenue, the ingredient cost and the production cost. Without a sales forecast, forecasting variable costs is guesswork.

Cost management → Demand prediction

When the system knows the real cost of a location, a production batch and a delivery, the forecast stops optimising volume alone and starts optimising margin. That is a different production decision from "bake as much as will sell".

Route planning → Cost management

Real cost and time for every delivery turn transport from an averaged line in overheads into an amount attached to a specific customer. Then you can see which customers are profitable.

The compounding effect: the longer we work on your data and the more modules are connected, the more accurate the forecasts get. The system does not stand still from the day it goes live — every month it knows your company better.

What this means for you

  • You are not buying a closed product. We add new modules on a regular basis, and they reach the clients already working with us.
  • There is no second implementation from scratch. Data, integrations and the cost structure configured once feed every following module from its first day.
  • We build what you actually need. The direction is set by the companies using the system daily — not by a roadmap written at a desk.

Features

The month, live

Costs and revenue incurred to date, set against the plan for the whole month, split by cost category and sales group. Alongside them — the projected close, EBITDA and operating profit.

Fixed-cost forecasting

Payroll, energy, rent, leasing, financial costs. The system learns from your history and your contract schedule, and accounts for seasonality and planned increases.

Alerts before a cost grows

An unplanned cost item, budget burning too fast, a falling sales forecast, a weather change affecting demand — the notification reaches you on a day when you can still react.

Every forecast explained

You never get just a number. You always see where it comes from.

Payroll plan: PLN 100,000. By 20 January, PLN 87,000 spent.

Projected close: PLN 120,000.

Why: expected pay rises in production (+5%), higher wages in the company stores in Gdańsk (+3%), and the last ten days of January historically account for 28% of the monthly cost.

Annual plan against actuals

Import the plan from a spreadsheet, budget revenue by sales group and costs by category, and compare plan to actuals on any day of the year.

Financial goal planner

You state a goal — say PLN 8 million net profit. The system shows at what turnover, margin and cost level it is achievable, and which levers matter most. Plus scenarios: flour up 12%, energy up 20%, one retail chain lost.

Dependency map

A visual link between the components that drive the result — you see how a change in one sales channel travels through costs all the way to profitability.

We connect to what you already run

We work directly on data from your ERP — among our clients that includes AXEL. Access is read-only: we write nothing back to the ERP and we do not change how your team works.

We also pull in the staffing plan, energy tariffs and contract schedules. Implementation starts with a data audit, during which we map your cost structure and check whether the history is sufficient for forecasting.

The data stays in infrastructure agreed with you. We do not share it with third parties and we do not use it to train models for other companies.

Who it is for

  • Bakeries with their own retail network several or a dozen outlets where the cost per location has to be visible separately
  • Producers working with retail chains where order volume decides the profitability of the month
  • Companies with more than one plant where costs have to be settled per plant
  • Boards planning the year who want to know in March, not in December, whether the plan is realistic

How implementation works

  1. Analysis (free)

    A conversation and a data review: what is in the ERP, what the cost structure looks like, where the gaps are. The outcome is a concrete answer on what can and cannot be forecast.

  2. Configuration

    Mapping cost categories and carriers, connecting data sources, importing the plan.

  3. Go-live

    The live month view, alerts, reports. Team training — half a day is enough.

  4. Extension

    Cost forecasts, the goal planner, scenarios. We add modules at a pace that suits you.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from Power BI or ERP reports?

A report shows what happened. We forecast what will happen — because we have a demand model that predicts sales. Without a sales forecast you cannot forecast variable costs, and in a bakery those are what decide the result.

How much history do you need?

For a sound seasonality forecast we need a minimum of 3.5 years of sales, prices, deliveries and returns. With a shorter history some modules work in a limited scope — we will say so honestly at the audit stage.

Do we have to change our ERP?

No. We connect to your existing environment in read-only mode.

Does this replace accounting?

No. It is a management tool. Accounting settles the past according to the regulations — we help you make decisions during the month.

Who uses it day to day?

The board, the finance director or chief accountant, production and sales managers. Each role sees its own scope.

If we buy one module today, what about the next ones?

All modules are one system and one database. Adding another does not mean starting the implementation again: the integrations, cost structure and history already work. What is more, each new module improves the accuracy of the ones you already have, because it brings new information into the shared model.

What does it cost?

Priced individually — a subscription model depending on the number of locations and the scope of modules. We agree the exact scope and terms after the free data analysis.

What we are building now

System development, kept current.

Module Status
Demand prediction production optimisation, fewer returns Available, live with clients
Cost management controlling and result forecasting Pilot implementations
Route planning delivery and transport-cost optimisation In preparation

Clients using one module get access to the next ones on the terms agreed at the first implementation — with no repeat integration and no reconfiguring of data.

Let us start with your data

A free analysis: using your own numbers, we show what the result forecast for the last closed month would have looked like and how close we would have come. No obligation and no implementation.