How much does your water refill or seltzer delivery business really make? With this calculator, you can estimate your monthly sales, the profit per jug or container, your monthly profit, and your break-even point in seconds. It also shows you how much money you lose on containers that aren’t returned.
These are sample values: change them to your business's numbers.
Your business without and with Yaku
| Without Yaku | With Yaku (Premium Plan) | |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel per month | ||
| Containers lost per month | ||
| Admin staff | ||
| Yaku Premium Plan | — | |
| Profit per month |
Adjust assumptions
The Premium Plan costs USD 96 per month; the conversion to your currency is approximate. The sample volume and fuel savings are based on real Yaku customer data; adjust them to your operation.
How to Use the Calculator
- Selling price: what you charge for each full jug or container. If you have different prices for households and businesses, use an average.
- Cost of producing one container: water, processing, cap, seal, and cleaning of each unit. Do not include salaries or rent here.
- Containers sold per day and delivery days: your actual volume for a typical month.
- Monthly expenses: fuel, salaries, rent for the premises, electricity and water, and other expenses such as maintenance and insurance. We’ve broken them down so you can see how much each one accounts for, especially fuel.
- Administrative staff: How many people do you have working on entering orders, reconciling the delivery drivers’ cash registers, keeping track of containers, and planning delivery routes, and how much does each person earn per month? The salaries of the rest of the staff—such as delivery drivers or full-time employees—go in their own field.
- Containers that don’t come back: the borrowed water jugs, jugs, or siphon bottles that go missing every month—and how much it costs you to replace each one.
How to Interpret the Results
Estimated monthly profit is what remains after paying for the cost of each container, your fixed expenses, and lost containers. If the result is negative, the business is losing money based on those figures.
The break-even point is the minimum number of packages you need to sell each day to avoid losing money. Anything you sell above that number is profit.
Losses from unreturned containers are often the most underestimated expense: they add up little by little, but over the course of a year they can amount to several months’ worth of profit.
With and Without Yaku: Why It’s an Investment, Not an Expense
Below the results, you’ll see your business broken down into two columns: how it stands today and how it would look with Yaku’s Premium Plan, including the cost of the plan. The comparison highlights three specific savings:
- Less fuel: Route optimization schedules deliveries to minimize the number of kilometers traveled. We use 30% less fuel, which is in line with what we’ve observed in Yaku’s actual customer deliveries.
- Less administrative work: Delivery drivers log deliveries, packages, and payments from their cell phones, and the system automatically updates orders, balances, and cash on hand. We estimate that Yaku automates half of that work—which is equivalent to half a person fewer on administrative tasks, so you can avoid hiring that person or reassign them to sales.
- Fewer lost containers: The loan tracking system records every container loaned to a customer, so you can recover them. We conservatively estimate that you’ll recover 30% of the containers that are currently lost.
This allows us to calculate how much more you earn per month, how much you get back for every unit you invest in Yaku, and how many days it takes for the plan to pay for itself. You can adjust both assumptions and the cost of the plan in your currency under “Adjust Assumptions.”
Three Ways to Improve Profitability
- Keep track of the containers you’ve borrowed. Keeping track of every delivery and return for each customer is the fastest way to stop losing money. Read about how to keep track of loaned water jugs.
- Organize your routes. Fewer kilometers per delivery means less fuel and more deliveries per day. Learn how to plan delivery routes.
- Collect payment on time. Unpaid debts are sales that haven’t turned into cash. Learn how to collect from delinquent customers.
Yaku helps you with all three: manage containers, routes, delivery drivers, and payments from a single platform. Learn more about our software for water refill business businesses and seltzer delivery businesses, or try it free for 7 days.