What an unattended shop's month is made of

What a monthly result is

It is the money that came in over a month less the money that went out in the same month. If something remains, that is what is left over; if not, you are short. The idea is plain. The hard part is counting everything that went out.

An unattended shop employs nobody, or almost nobody, so wages are small or absent. That makes it tempting to subtract the rent and stop. Yet having no staff enlarges some costs rather than shrinking them. Machines work in your place, so power runs all day. Nobody stands at a till, so nearly everything arrives by card and carries a fee. Nobody is watching, so a share goes missing or gets broken.

So this calculator does not shorten the form. Plenty of items will be zero, and that is fine, but it should be a zero you looked at and typed. An item that is zero because nobody asked looks like money that never goes out, and that is the thing this page exists to fix.

The three parts

The first is money coming in: average daily takings times the days you open. This is not something the calculator knows; it is something you supply. Before you open it is a guess, and if the guess is off the rest being right will not save the answer. Trying a low figure and then a high one tells you more than entering one number once.

The second is money that rides on sales: what you paid for the stock, the fee on card payments, and the share that passes its date and gets thrown out. All three grow with sales, so they go in as percentages rather than amounts. The card fee applies only to the part paid by card, so the card share and the fee rate are entered separately and multiplied together.

The third is money that goes out even when sales are zero: rent, the building service charge, electricity, water and gas, the internet line and cameras, equipment payments, insurance, and cleaning you pay somebody to do. Theft, breakage and repairs sit here too. Those last two do not track sales neatly and swing about from month to month, so a monthly average amount misstates less than a percentage would.

Break even follows from these three. Divide what goes out every month by one minus the share that rides on sales, and you have the monthly takings that come to zero; divide that by the days you open and you have a daily figure. If the share riding on sales passes 100%, the division does not hold. Selling more then leaves you further behind, and this calculator says so plainly instead of printing a number.

What this calculator does

This section describes what the code does, in order. There are twenty one boxes, and seventeen of them must be filled before the result opens. Money spent up front, the deposit and your own hours are the other three, and the monthly result works without them, so they are not required.

A blank box is not a zero. An unfilled box stays empty inside the code and is never counted as zero. Its name joins a list instead, and the result stays closed until that list is empty. Each box carries a button that sets it to zero in one tap, so items that do not apply take a moment to clear.

Takings are daily takings times days open. The share riding on sales adds the cost of goods and the written off share directly, and adds the card part as the card share multiplied by the fee rate. If 90% is paid by card and the fee is 2%, then 1.8% of takings goes on fees, and that multiplied figure is what the table shows.

What is left over is takings less the share riding on sales less what goes out every month. Negative results are not clipped to zero. A negative result is labelled as being short and the amount is shown as it is. Payback months are the up front money divided by what is left over, and when what is left over is zero or less the division does not hold, so no month count is invented and the page says why.

The deposit is kept out of the payback division because you get it back when you close, so it was never spent. That it is tied up until then is noted separately on the result.

An outline fills in no amounts. It marks the boxes worth checking for that trade and nothing disappears whichever outline you pick. An outline that removed boxes would be asserting that the trade has no such cost, and that is not something this calculator can know.

Not one amount here comes prefilled. We could not find published measured figures for what these trades spend on power or lose to spoilage. The Korea Fair Trade Commission franchise disclosure registry goes as far as average outlet sales by brand, and cost by line item is not among the published fields. An invented figure would look like the most trustworthy thing on the screen, and people trust that over their own situation.

Copying a result link puts the numbers you typed into the address and nothing more. Nothing is stored on a server, and the page that opens the link runs the same arithmetic again.

Filling it in

Do not enter daily takings only once. Looking at a low figure and a high one shows how sensitive this shop is to sales. The larger the monthly outgoings, the more a small wobble in takings moves the answer.

Do not set electricity from one season's bill. Freezers and heating differ sharply between summer and winter. A year of bills divided by twelve is closer to a monthly average.

For repairs, take one large repair a year and divide by twelve. Loading it into the month it happened makes that month look far worse and every other month better than it was.

If you clean the place yourself, type zero in that box and put those hours in the box for your own time. The money did not go out but the time did, and it comes back below as what an hour of yours is worth.

Cost of goods is what you paid divided by what you sold it for. Buy at 1,000 and sell at 1,500 and it is 1000 over 1500, about 67. A shop that sells time or the use of a machine rather than goods types zero.

The four costs a rent only sum misses

First, service charges and power beyond the rent. Rent is in the contract so it rarely gets missed, but the building often collects a service charge separately, and power is large in an unattended shop in particular. Freezers, washers and the lit sign keep running after everyone has gone home. This calculator gives the service charge and electricity boxes of their own so each is entered separately.

Second, the card fee. With no one at the till nearly everything arrives by card. The fee applies to the card portion rather than to all takings, so the card share and the fee rate are taken separately and multiplied. Rates differ by merchant and by turnover, so no default is supplied. Use the rate on your card statement or merchant portal.

Third, what gets written off. Where the goods carry a date, whatever does not sell becomes a loss outright. It grows with sales, so it goes in as a percentage. A shop with nothing to throw away types zero, and typing zero is not the same as never being asked.

Fourth, theft, breakage and repairs. These are what an unwatched shop runs into, and they go in as a monthly average. Where the machines are large, a single failure can turn a month around by itself. Sales lost while the machine stood idle are not in the repair figure though. That part only shows if you lower the daily takings for the month.

Where people get stuck

If the result will not open, a box is still blank. The page says how many and links to each one. Fill in zero rather than leaving it, even for items that do not apply. That zero is the whole point.

If no break even figure appears, the share riding on sales has passed 100%. Add up the cost of goods, the card part and the written off share. If those three exceed 100 then you are selling for less than you buy, and no amount of extra selling closes that.

If no payback months appear, what is left over is zero or less. The calculator does not invent a month count there. Printing a number where the division does not hold would make that number a lie.

If the answer does not match reality, start with daily takings. Outgoings can be checked against bills and contracts, while daily takings are usually a guess, and a guess that is 20% out moves what is left over by a great deal more.

This page does not introduce operators and does not urge anyone to open a shop. It does not say which trade is better and it does not say what you can earn. Type figures in and it shows you what those figures come to.