Utilities are the line that decides the year
Rent is fixed. Water, sewer, natural gas and hydro are not: they climb with every wash started and every dryer minute sold, which makes them the closest thing a laundromat has to a cost of goods sold. Books that pour all of it into one line called utilities hide the only margin story worth reading. We keep water and sewer, gas, and hydro on separate ledger lines and divide each by the month's turns, so the statements report a cost per turn instead of a lump sum.
That one habit catches real money. A hot-water valve stuck open, an aging top-loader drinking several times the water a modern front-loader needs, a municipal rate increase quietly compounding: each shows up as a moving cost per turn months before it becomes an alarming bill. It also settles pricing arguments, because a proposed vend-price change can be tested against what a turn actually costs to deliver instead of against a hunch.
Self-serve, wash-dry-fold and commercial each keep their own line
The revenue side is three different businesses sharing one room, and End-to-End Accounting keeps them apart. Self-serve collections come off card and app platforms such as PayRange, Laundroworks or Speed Queen Insights, which report by machine and by day; any coin still in the mix gets a collection log with dates and amounts, and every bank deposit ties back to it. Wash-dry-fold runs through a point of sale like Cents or CleanCloud, is sold by the pound, and is recognized when the order goes out the door, with prepaid pound packages held as a customer balance until they are used.
Commercial linen and uniform accounts are invoiced monthly, which quietly introduces receivables to a business that never used to have any; we age them, follow them up and run the payments through Plooto. Dry-cleaning counters add one more wrinkle: garments paid on drop-off and never collected. A written policy for stale tickets, applied consistently in the books, keeps that rack of orphaned orders from becoming a year-end mystery.
What each cost line should be telling you
| Cost line | What drives it | What the books should show |
|---|---|---|
| Water and sewer | Wash volume and machine age | Cost per turn, tracked month over month |
| Natural gas | Dryer minutes and hot-water demand | Seasonal swing separated from volume growth |
| Hydro | Cycles, lighting and HVAC | Base load split from per-turn load |
| Wash-dry-fold labour | Pounds processed | Labour cost per pound, beside the per-pound price |
| Parts and repairs | Fleet age | Repairs logged by machine, feeding replacement calls |
| Supplies and packaging | Counter sales and folding volume | A margin check on every retail line |
The repairs-by-machine detail earns its keep at replacement time: when one washer has quietly consumed a quarter of the repair budget, the capital decision writes itself. Funding and timing that replacement against the tax rules is a separate discipline, and our Tax Planning & Advisory work picks the story up from there.
Payroll for attendants, honesty about owner hours
The first attendant hire turns a simple store into an employer: a CRA payroll account, source deductions, vacation pay, statutory holidays, WSIB registration and T4s out by the end of February. We run all of it inside the same engagement, with evening and weekend shifts costed against the hours they serve. Ontario's Employer Health Tax rarely enters the picture, because it only begins above a $1 million payroll exemption that a single-store operator seldom approaches.
One caution the statements should carry: an owner-operated store looks more profitable than an attended one because the owner's hours cost nothing on paper. We flag that plainly in the reporting, since a store that only works when you do is a different asset from one that pays for its own labour, and the difference matters to lenders and buyers alike.
A month-end built for a seven-day business
Laundromats never close for month-end, so the close has to come to them. On a fixed rhythm we deliver revenue by stream, utility cost per turn, wash-dry-fold cost per pound, collections reconciled to deposits, and HST set aside from tax-included machine revenue, for stores and cleaners across Mississauga and the GTA. A solo owner-operator not ready for a full monthly engagement can keep a CPA on call through CPA Quick Support at $99 a month; everything larger is scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
