Laundry Shop Bookkeeping 101: Tracking Income, Supplies, and True Profit

Gross revenue: what you collected from customers. This is the number most owners know.

Cost of supplies: detergent, conditioner, dryer sheets, plastic bags, tags. These scale with volume — more kilos means more chemicals.

Utility costs: electricity and water are your two biggest variable costs. A commercial washer and dryer running 10 hours a day can account for ₱8,000–₱20,000 in electricity per month depending on your municipality's rate and machine wattage.

Labor: if you have one or more laundry staff, their daily wage plus any overtime is a fixed cost regardless of how many kilos come in.

Your true profit is gross revenue minus all three cost categories. Most owners who calculate this for the first time are surprised by how much smaller it is than their intuition suggested.

Logging income only. Many owners write down how much they collected each day but never log the detergent they bought that week or the Meralco bill that arrived on the 15th. This creates an illusion of profit that evaporates at the end of the month.

Buying supplies in bulk and forgetting the cost. A 25-kilo pail of detergent bought in one transaction looks like a single large expense in a single day, but it covers four to six weeks of operations. If you log it as a one-day cost, that day looks terrible and every subsequent day looks artificially good.

Ignoring water bills. Water is a cost that arrives monthly and is easy to forget because it's not a daily cash outflow. But for a busy laundry shop, water can cost ₱2,000–₱6,000 per month — money that needs to be allocated across every kilo you washed that month.

You need two categories: income and expense. Under income, you log each day's total collection from laundry services. If you also sell laundry supplies to customers (extra fabric conditioner, dryer sheets), that goes in a separate income line.

Under expenses, you want at least these sub-categories: supplies (detergent, conditioner, packaging), utilities (electricity, water), labor, and miscellaneous.

Every time you buy detergent, log it. Every time your Meralco bill arrives, log it — and tag it as the utility expense for that billing period, not just the day you paid it.

The most useful metric for a laundry shop is cost per kilo — how much it costs you in supplies and utilities to wash, dry, and fold one kilogram of laundry. If your rate is ₱65/kg and your cost per kilo is ₱42, you're making ₱23 per kilo before labor. Once you know this number, you know whether a rate increase is justified, whether bulk pricing to corporate clients makes sense, and whether a new machine would pay for itself.

You don't need a formula. Log your supply and utility costs monthly, divide by total kilos processed that month, and you have your cost per kilo.

At the end of each day, you or your staff can snap a photo of the register total or submit the day's income in the app. Supply purchases can be logged by scanning or photographing a receipt. Monthly utility bills can be uploaded as a photo or entered manually in seconds.

Pipable categorises each entry automatically, calculates your running totals, and flags any month where utility costs spike beyond their usual level — which often means a machine is running inefficiently or a bill was estimated too high.