Many jar owners know their selling price and have a feeling about profit. Fewer know what a jar actually costs them once everything is counted. The gap between the feeling and the number is where a business stays busy and still struggles.
This guide does not quote market prices or industry averages. Costs vary by city, water source, treatment method and route length. It gives you a way to find your own numbers and a worked example, with made-up figures, to show the method.
Start with what you sell
You sell a delivered, filled 20-litre jar. That is different from a litre of treated water. The jar has to be filled, capped, loaded, driven, handed over, collected as an empty and accounted for. Every one of those steps costs something, so profit is measured per jar delivered, after all of them.
The cost buckets
Group your costs into six buckets. Use monthly totals so that irregular costs average out.
1. Water and treatment
Raw water, power for the plant, filters, membranes, chemicals, cleaning and testing. Include the cost of changing filters and membranes when they wear out, spread over their life. If you buy treated water, use that bill instead.
2. Jar and cap replacement
Jars crack, scratch and wear. Caps and seals are used once or lost. Include the yearly cost of replacing jars, spread across the months. If your fleet is old, this bucket is larger than it looks.
3. Fuel and vehicle
Petrol or diesel, vehicle repairs, tyres, insurance, loading charges and parking or fines. If one vehicle serves several routes, divide its cost fairly across them.
4. Driver and helper pay
Salaries, per-jar incentives, helper wages and any overtime in a rush. Add the cost of a substitute when a driver is absent.
5. Losses
This bucket is the one owners leave out. It has two parts.
- Missing empties. Each jar that goes out and never comes back is a replacement cost. You may not notice until the fleet runs short.
- Unpaid credit. Money you billed and never collected. A customer who owes for months and then stops ordering is a real cost, even if the invoice still shows on paper.
6. Overhead
Rent, office staff, electricity for the office, phone, licences and fees you pay as per current rules (check current rules with the relevant authority), accounting, software and your own pay if you take any. Divide the monthly total by the number of jars delivered.
A simple margin formula
Work in monthly totals, then convert to a per-jar figure.
- Revenue per jar equals the money you actually collected in the month, divided by the jars delivered.
- Cost per jar equals the sum of all six buckets, divided by the jars delivered.
- Margin per jar equals revenue per jar minus cost per jar.
- Margin percentage equals margin per jar divided by revenue per jar, times 100.
One choice matters. Use money collected, not money billed. If you bill ₹1,00,000 and collect ₹90,000, your revenue is closer to ₹90,000. Billed amounts that never arrive are the first leak.
Worked example
This is an Example. Every number is made up and round. It is illustrative, not a result, an average or a benchmark for any real business. Use it to see the method, then replace each figure with your own.
Assume a small business in one month.
- Jars delivered: 3,000
- Billed amount: ₹1,00,000
- Collected: ₹90,000 (the rest is still owed)
Costs for the month, in made-up round figures.
| Bucket | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Water and treatment | ₹18,000 |
| Jar and cap replacement | ₹6,000 |
| Fuel and vehicle | ₹12,000 |
| Driver and helper pay | ₹24,000 |
| Losses: missing empties | ₹4,000 |
| Losses: unpaid credit written off or doubtful | ₹6,000 |
| Overhead | ₹15,000 |
| Total | ₹85,000 |
Now the per-jar figures.
- Revenue per jar: ₹90,000 divided by 3,000 jars is ₹30.
- Cost per jar: ₹85,000 divided by 3,000 jars is about ₹28.33.
- Margin per jar: ₹30 minus ₹28.33 is about ₹1.67.
- Margin percentage: ₹1.67 divided by ₹30 is about 5.6 percent.
Now see what happens if the owner had looked only at the bill. Billed revenue per jar is ₹1,00,000 divided by 3,000, which is about ₹33.33. Without the losses bucket, cost is ₹75,000, which is ₹25 per jar. That view shows a margin of about ₹8.33 per jar, which looks healthy. The gap between ₹8.33 and ₹1.67 is what the owner cannot see on a bill.
Small changes also matter. In this example, if the owner recovers ₹6,000 of the doubtful credit and cuts missing empties by half, the monthly result improves by about ₹8,000, which is roughly ₹2.67 per jar. Again, these are made-up numbers to show the effect of leaks, not a promise.
Where profit leaks
Most leaks are small and repeated. Look for these.
- Empties not coming back. A fleet shrinks slowly. Track the bottle balance by customer. The guide on empty jar tracking shows how.
- Credit that ages. The older a dues amount, the less likely you collect it. See how to stop credit leakage.
- Extras given free. Jars given beyond the plan with no record and no bill.
- Discounts that stay. A special price given for one month that nobody revisits. See standing orders and pricing per customer.
- Long, thin routes. A route with few jars and many kilometres eats fuel and driver time.
- Half-empty trips. Driving out with a partial load because orders were not grouped.
- Rework. Redelivering because a stop was missed or a jar was wrong.
- Spoilage and breakage. Jars dropped, caps lost, water spilled.
- Cash that does not reach the office. Money taken at the doorstep and recorded late, or not at all.
- Time. Staff doing by hand what could be done once, such as re-typing the register at night.
Use your own numbers
You can run your own figures through the jar margin calculator. Enter your monthly costs and the jars you delivered, and it shows the margin per jar. Run it three times. Once with your billed amount, once with what you collected, and once with the losses bucket included. The difference between the three tells you how much your picture changes when you count everything.
A tip for getting started. If you cannot find a number, estimate it, mark it as an estimate, and improve it next month. A rough but honest figure beats an exact figure that leaves out a bucket.
How Pyaau helps
Pyaau is an Android app for jar delivery businesses.
What it does today that touches the leak list. It counts empties on every stop and keeps a bottle balance per run. It keeps a customer ledger with “Owes you” and “Credit”. It shows a dues report with ageing buckets (0-30, 31-60 and 60+ days) and the customers owing most. It flags short and extra deliveries and lets you report them by customer or route. Standing orders can carry their own price per customer.
For the margin work, use the calculator or a sheet. Records from any tool show where the leaks are.