Car Wash Financial Model

So you want to get into the car washing business? Well it is probably more expensive than you thought, but assuming a lucrative location is acquired and no catastrophes happen it can be a viable business endeavor. In order for you to see what kind of scenarios will yield various returns / profits, this 5 year financial model has been built and tailored to the tunnel car wash business.




Pricing
*After purchase, you will be taken to the template download page.

A tunnel car was is the type of wash where cars drive up and select a wash type and then based on their chosen type they are hooked onto a track and pulled through the various stages of the tunnel and receive a nice cleaning.

There are many ways to go about developing startup cost, running cost, and revenue assumptions. I have researched some of the industry standard metrics and built a nice flow of back-end structures so that you can get a nice five year financial forecast of operations and returns.

The Assumption Tabs Include:
  • Startup costs / financing %
  • On-going costs (variable per car and fixed)
  • Revenue (car count per month by year and % of each car falling into each pricing ticket)
  • Include sale of business or not / 2 valuation techniques to choose (EBITDA multiple or % of annual sales)
Beyond just showing operating income, this model goes into break even month/year, financing variables dynamically updating the cash flow, potential sale of the business, and the actual cash outlay after taking into account financing (so we can do an IRR calculation).

You also get a nice set of charts to visualize running cash position of the business itself, revenue, expenses, profit, and other metrics such as margin %'s and car count per wash type by year.

The other use you can achieve with this car wash financial model is using it as a sort of budget / goal. This is the main reason why a monthly and annual P&L summary was included. The monthly allows you to better track what you actually end up doing per month and how close/off your assumptions were. Based on that you can start setting monthly goals / annual goals and track actual progress.

The best way to use this for budgeting is simply creating a copy of the template. You use one for actuals and one with your forecasts.