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A poor forecast rarely stands out. There’s no alarm, no invoice titled “Planning Error”—just full return bins in the evening, empty shelves in the afternoon, and a margin that’s smaller than it could be. That’s exactly why this issue is underestimated in many businesses: The costs are real, but invisible.
This article sheds light on the issue—with a straightforward calculation that every business can follow on its own.
The Bill: What Poor Planning Really Costs
Let's take a bakery with annual sales of 800,000 CHF and a return rate of 15%—a figure typical for the industry.
Cost Category 1: Overproduction. A 15% return rate means that merchandise with a retail value of approximately 120,000 CHF is produced but not sold. Even if only the manufacturing costs—raw materials, energy, and a proportionate share of labor hours—are taken into account, there is still a real loss of several tens of thousands of francs per year.
Cost Category 2: Lost Revenue. The silent counterpart to returns is the empty shelf. Every product that’s sold out by 3:00 p.m. is a sale that never happened—and doesn’t show up in any statistics. Businesses that improve the availability of popular items by just a few percentage points see a noticeable increase in revenue: for “ GoNina ” businesses, this can be as much as 6%.
Cost Category 3: Work Time. Daily manual planning—checking numbers, making estimates, creating lists, and coordinating between stores—can easily take an hour a day. Over the course of a year, that adds up to several hundred hours of skilled labor.
Cost Category 4: Follow-on Costs. Disposal fees, time spent recording and sorting returns, price pressure due to factored-in losses—and, last but not least, the damage to a company’s sustainability reputation when full baskets are disposed of every day.
All told, the annual impact of poor forecasts at an average-sized company can easily reach the five-figure range—year after year.
Why Gut Feelings Are Systematically Wrong
Experienced planners are often spot on on normal days. The costly mistakes happen on the other days: during an unexpected change in the weather, on the first day of vacation, or before a holiday with an unusual schedule. That’s exactly when demand spikes the most—and that’s exactly when manual estimates are at their weakest, because there’s no historical data to draw on.
Add to that the sheer volume: With 100 items and multiple stores, hundreds of individual decisions have to be made every day. No human can get them all right—AI makes them measurably better because it takes into account the weather, the day of the week, holidays, and location patterns all at once.
The Offset
Businesses that use GoNina reduce their excess inventory by up to 52%, increase sales by up to 6%, and save up to 12 hours of planning time per month. For the example bakery mentioned above, simply cutting the return rate in half would reduce losses from overproduction by tens of thousands of francs per year—not to mention the impact on sales.
On the other hand, there are the costs of the solution, which are clearly listed on the website. For most businesses, the investment pays for itself within the first few months. And getting started is risk-free: a four-week trial period with a money-back guarantee.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I figure out how much poor planning is costing my business?
Calculate your return rate per item in francs and count the number of days on which top sellers were sold out before closing time. These two figures reveal the bulk of the potential.
Is this worth it for small businesses, too?
The absolute amounts are smaller, but the percentages are the same. Especially when margins are tight, reducing inventory loss often makes the difference between a good year and a difficult one.
Conclusion
Poor forecasts don't cost money that you spend—they cost money that you never see: lost cost of goods sold, lost revenue, wasted time. Anyone who honestly calculates these costs will understand why accurate forecasts aren't just a gimmick, but a lever for improving margins.
You can read about how AI sales forecasts work in general in our comprehensive guide for bakeries.
