A closer look at the Financial Model.

THE FINANCIAL MODEL · IMPERIAL VITALITY 3 PER-LOCATION AND THE LEASE CALCULATOR WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY LIVES Thirteen locations, one month, same products: $3,965 at the top, $346 at the bottom. The portfolio number tells you how the business is doing. The per-location tab tells you why. My May 2026 tab is in there untouched, margins computed. Use it two ways. First, as a benchmark: my blended gross margin ran about 55% on net sales, and I treated anything under 50% at a single location as a question that needed an answer: product mix, spoilage, pricing, or a problem. Second, as a warning about your own data: Sandhills reads 42.9% in the platform's report because of a single mis- keyed item cost. Its true margin was about 61%, the best on the route. One wrong cost entry made my best location look like my worst, and I only caught it because I checked. The formulas in your tab are honest; the numbers you feed them might not be. The lease calculator is the sheet I ran before financing anything, preloaded with my real second lease: $12,040 of coolers at 12% over five years. The payment was $267.83 a month, manageable, and the total interest was $4,029.51, which is a third of a cooler handed to the finance company. That's not automatically a bad deal; those coolers earned their keep. But run the sheet before you sign, look at the total-interest cell, and decide on purpose. I paid every lease off before I sold, because equipment with a clear balance is worth more than equipment with a story. One habit worth stealing: copy the per-location tab every month and keep the old ones. Three months of history on that one tab told me which locations to grow, which to fix, and which two I kept for reasons that had nothing to do with money. That's allowed, as long as you know you're doing it. That habit has a power tool: the second workbook, the working income statement. It's a rebuilt version of the spreadsheet I actually ran every month: one tab per location, all feeding an Income_ALL rollup, with the commission math wired the way it really works. A local host's share comes off that location's operating profit; the exchange partner's 12% comes off collected revenue. Payroll works the way I actually did it: type one total from your time tracker on the rollup tab and it splits across your active locations. Every month I pulled a report per location from the VMS and typed the numbers in by hand. Tedious, yes. It's also how I caught every problem I ever caught. My original had its quirks (the payroll formula divided by the wrong count half the time), and this version fixes them. The tedium stays, because the tedium is the point.