Evidence for costs.
Evidence for revenue.

The standard for each business and state.

Each study must support opening costs, recurring operating costs and revenue independently for its actual business format and geography. State differences must follow evidence. No random adjustments, universal state multiplier or wage-only localization may become a completed state study.

1. Check the business and place. Define the format, capacity, paid work, owner role and exclusions. A statewide reference combines documented local cases with compatible industry-establishment weights. One locality remains a locality-specific case.
2. Research costs and revenue separately. Retain scoped premises and equipment quotes, fit-out evidence, employer obligations, utilities, insurance and permits. Build selling prices from a comparable product mix and demand from independent evidence, then check capacity and industry receipts. Reconcile opening cash, operating profit, working capital, owner compensation and payback.
3. Review the actual conclusion. Map material claims to direct sources and independent checks. Explain conflicts, dates and uncertainty. Review the exact article and inputs for a useful local decision, with an accountable publisher and correction contact.

Evidence that must travel with each input.

Record the value, unit, business, geography, observation period, retrieval date, source and exact claim, definition, derivation, reuse limits, uncertainty and review decision. An assumed or missing material input keeps the study incomplete. A changed source or article invalidates dependent approval.

Collection and financial safeguards.

A researched state reference normally needs at least eight usable premises observations and six comparable customer-price observations across its selected local strata. These are collection targets, not proof of representativeness. Smaller samples support a narrower case only. Material inputs need a direct source or defensible derivation plus an independent check. Default materiality is a plausible change of at least 5% in funding, profit or break-even, or a change in viability; required permissions are always material.

Demand cannot be inferred from capacity or population. A menu price is not an achieved average ticket. Payroll must include the paid roster and separately derived employer costs. Coherent downside, base and upside cases must distinguish opening-year and mature results. Owner wages, profit and distributions must remain separate.

Approval and publication.

Approval of this standard does not certify the earlier reference scenarios. Implementation begins with one business across three contrasting state contexts, followed by review before wider expansion. The owner opened the reference planning pages to search on September 6, 2026. This later search-publication decision does not certify complete state research or remove the evidence, review and accountability requirements for that designation.

Download the exact approved methodology · Approval record · Research readiness across all profiles

What is observed?

BLS May 2025 supplies the selected occupation benchmarks. A suppressed state estimate is retained as missing; any national proxy used in a scenario is explicitly identified. Each business selects the relevant paid roles. The data is cross-industry, ownership 1235; a manager or counter-service occupation is not an establishment-specific hiring quote. BLS wage data can include tips and excludes employer benefits and overtime premiums.

Census Vintage 2025 provides July 1 population estimates for 2024 and 2025. Percentage change is calculated from the same vintage. Neither population nor its growth determines the number of customers in the model.

State wage dataset · BLS definitions · Census dataset

What is assumed?

Operating format, capacity, trading days, customer volume, selling price, paid hours, the 18% employer allowance, premises cost, setup payments, variable costs, other fixed costs, maintenance investment, receivable days, the opening ramp and a two-month fixed-cost cash buffer are authored assumptions. They are shown on every profile and remain separate from observations.

Hours are aggregate paid roster hours. Every required role is paid, including management or supervision. No unpaid owner labor or anticipated tip credit reduces the reference payroll. An owner doing a role occupies that role once.

The reference budget uses state wages and otherwise identical commercial inputs within a business. Funding differences reflect that narrow method; they do not prove cheaper premises, less regulation, stronger demand or better returns in a state.

The operating and cash formulas.

Cleaning revenue uses average active accounts multiplied by a monthly fee, following the source inventory’s recurring-service logic. Capacity is constrained by 26 labor hours per account and 346.66 paid cleaner hours. Two cleaners working together for one clock hour consume two labor hours; supervisor hours add cost without creating additional cleaning capacity. The ramp describes average active accounts, with no acquisition-cost or post-ramp churn forecast. Receivables are monthly revenue × 15 / 30. The food formats collect sales within the month and hold the opening inventory balance constant.

Calculations use unrounded numeric values; displayed currency rounds to whole dollars except per-unit prices and wage rates. Downloaded schedules retain two decimal places. This demonstration is not a tax or accounting ledger.

What the 60-month schedule includes.

The ramp is 40%, 55%, 70%, 82%, 90%, 96%, then 100% of assumed sales demand, always capped at capacity. Full fixed costs and paid labor start in month one. No seasonality, inflation or automatic wage growth is added. Asset depreciation spans 60 months. No resale or deposit recovery is included.

The largest negative cumulative operating cash balance determines the deficit reserve. An additional buffer equals two months of the modeled fixed cash costs. If mature cash is negative, the page flags that more reserve cannot solve continuing losses.

Payback starts from actual pre-opening payments. It is the first month when cumulative project cash has recovered those payments and remains nonnegative through month 60. Financing, income taxes, owner distributions and household reserves are excluded and require a separate plan.

What is not scored.

No Business Idea Score, State Fit rank or composite Data Quality percentage is assigned. Wage and population coverage alone cannot validate those judgments. The earlier scoring design remains a methodology example, not an assessment of these businesses.