Laundromat CFO services: the machines keep score — turns per day, cost per turn

Turns per day is the number the store lives on

Every machine has a simple economy: vend price per cycle, minus the water, gas, and hydro that cycle consumes, times how many times a day it turns. Card and app payment systems ended the era of guessing — platforms like Cents and modern card readers report revenue per machine, per daypart, every day. We turn that feed into a monthly view: turns per day by machine size, contribution per turn after utilities, and the dead zones in the schedule where the store sits full of idle capital.

The pattern that emerges almost always surprises owners: the big washers earn the most per turn and are the most likely to have a queue on weekends, while some small units barely clear their utility draw. That picture is what every decision below is built on.

Machine ROI: replace, upsize, or keep repairing

A replacement decision is a handful of your own numbers, not a dealer's brochure. We run them on one page before you sign anything.

Because equipment from makers like Speed Queen, Dexter, and Huebsch comes out of US factories, pricing, parts, and financing frequently involve USD and border costs — that side of the file lives on our laundromat cross-border tax page. Domestically, the HST input tax credits on a six-figure equipment package are real money and worth timing properly.

Unattended hours are margin only if you count everything

The unattended model earns its reputation only when the full cost of nobody-being-there is counted: cameras and monitoring, alarm response, refunds issued through the app the next morning, extra cleaning visits, insurance terms, and the occasional vandalism deductible. We compare revenue per unattended hour against those costs by daypart, because the answer is rarely all-or-nothing — many stores make money staying open to midnight unattended but lose it between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Extended hours are a dial, and the card system gives you the data to set it.

Wash-dry-fold and routes: the second business inside the store

Wash-dry-fold turns a self-serve store into a labour business, so it needs a labour price: minutes per pound of attendant time, plus supplies and machine time, sets the per-pound floor before any competitor's flyer does. Pickup-and-delivery adds route economics on top — a route only pays at density, so we track revenue per stop and drive time per order rather than celebrating order count. Commercial accounts (spas, clinics, restaurants, short-term-rental cleaners) are the quiet prize: recurring volume in the store's dead hours, though they bring receivables and payment terms into a business that used to bank cash daily. Dry-cleaning plants layer piece pricing, solvent and environmental costs onto the same framework.

Store two, routes, or neither

The second store only replicates results if you know exactly what made store one work — turns per day, utility cost per turn, and the demographics inside the drive-time radius, not the month-end bank balance. Sometimes the numbers say the better next dollar is a delivery van and a commercial salesperson, not another lease. We run that comparison as part of a monthly fixed-fee cadence — machine-level KPIs, cash and HST planning, financing support — on the foundation of our laundromat bookkeeping service.