Laundromat Bookkeeping: Coins, Cards and Kilos

It is Thursday. The coin box in machine four is full, two service-wash bags have been sitting on the rack since Monday, a customer has left a suit that has now been ready for eleven days, and the electricity bill came in higher than last quarter. You know roughly what the shop takes. You have no reliable idea what the shop keeps. Laundry is one of those trades where the takings are visible and the costs are invisible, which is exactly the wrong way round for keeping books.

Most laundries are two or three businesses sharing a floor. Self-service machines take coins or cards without anyone writing anything down. Service washes are priced per kilo and paid either at drop-off or at collection, depending on the customer. Dry cleaning and repairs come with a ticket and a delay. Each of those creates money at a different moment, and if you record all of it as one lump called "takings" you will never be able to tell which part of the shop is carrying the other.

Why laundry money is harder to track than it looks

• Coin machines pay you in a lump when you empty them, which may be several days after the washes actually happened.
• Card and app machines pay into your bank later and net of processor fees, so the statement never matches the machine counter.
• Service washes priced per kilo are often quoted before the load is weighed, and the ticket price can change at collection.
• Garments held for collection are work you have already done and, in many cases, money you have not yet received.
• Water, electricity and gas arrive as one bill weeks or months after the washes that caused them.

Start with the coin machines, and record by collection rather than by day. When you empty a machine, write the date, the machine and the amount counted. That is the honest number; anything else is estimation. If you empty on a fixed rhythm, every Monday for example, the figures become comparable week to week, and a machine that suddenly drops is usually a machine with a jam or a fault rather than a machine nobody likes. Do not fold coin collections into the counter total, even though the coins end up in the same bag.

Card and app machines need a second habit. Once a week, take the machine's own report and compare it with what actually landed in the bank. There will be a gap, and the gap is fees. Write both figures side by side rather than only the bank figure. You are not doing this to police the provider. You are doing it so that when your accountant asks what your income was, you can give a gross figure and a fee figure instead of a net one that quietly understates your turnover.

For service washes, pick one rule and never break it: record the job on the day it comes in, and record the money on the day it is paid. Most small laundries try to do both at once and end up with drop-offs booked as income that later gets discounted, or collections counted twice. Two short lists, jobs taken in and money received, are far easier to keep straight than one clever list trying to be both at the same time.

Items held for collection deserve their own line, because they are the shop's quiet liability. A rail of finished garments is finished work. If they are paid on collection, they are money owed to you. If they were paid at drop-off, they are space and risk. Either way, a ticket list with date in, customer, item count and paid or unpaid takes a minute a day and prevents the two familiar arguments: the customer who insists they already paid, and the coat that has been on the rail since spring.

A weekly routine that keeps a laundry honest

• Empty the coin machines on the same day each week and record the amount per machine, not just the total.
• Take the card terminal or app report, note the gross figure, then check what actually reached the bank.
• Total the week's service-wash tickets and mark which were paid at drop-off and which at collection.
• Walk the collection rail and list anything older than two weeks with the customer's name against it.
• Write down every cash purchase, including detergent, hangers, poly bags and any service call-out.
• Read the electricity, gas and water meters and write the numbers with the date beside them.

That meter reading is the habit that separates laundries which survive price rises from laundries which get ambushed by them. Utilities are your real cost of goods; detergent is almost a rounding error next to heat and water. Reading the meters monthly gives you consumption, and consumption divided by the number of washes gives you a cost per cycle. As an invented illustration only: a month with 1,400 washes and an energy bill of 980 works out at roughly 0.70 of energy per wash before anything else. Your own two figures will differ, but once you have them you can price a service wash with an actual floor underneath it.

When the numbers do not match, and most weeks they will not, resist the urge to force them. Coin counts run short because change was given out of the box. Card totals run high because a refund has not cleared yet. Write the difference down as a difference, with one line about what you think caused it. A record of small unexplained gaps is genuinely useful over a year. A record that has been quietly adjusted to look tidy is worth nothing at all.