Why is inflatable rental bookkeeping different?
An inflatable company looks simple on paper. You buy a unit, you rent it out, you get paid. But every rental has hidden costs that never show up on the quote.
Somebody loads it, drives it, sets it up, stakes it down, tears it down, brings it home and cleans it. A water slide takes a lot longer to clean than a bounce house. A wind day can cancel half your Saturday after the crew already showed up. And every unit is slowly wearing out, whether it rents or not.
General bookkeeping lumps all of that into "rental income" and "payroll." You see a total. You don't see which units are carrying the business and which ones are just taking up space.
Austin, who started 10.4 Financial, ran an inflatable rental company in Arizona for five years. We set up your books the way we wish ours had been set up.
What should every inflatable pay for?
A lot of owners are told to charge about 10% of what a unit cost. That rule is easy, but it skips the costs that decide whether a unit makes money. We teach that every unit has three jobs:
- Pay itself back. The profit from its rentals has to cover what you paid for it.
- Pay its rent. It takes up space in your warehouse or storage unit every month, rented or not.
- Pay for the next one. Someday it wears out. Its profit should also cover the unit that replaces it.
Here's an example. Say a water slide cost $4,000 and rents for $350. After setup, teardown and an hour of cleaning, say it clears about $280 a rental before delivery. It takes up 30 square feet, and your storage costs $1 per square foot a month. That's $360 a year in rent.
Over three years, its jobs add up to $4,000 to pay itself back, $1,080 in rent and $4,000 for the next one. That's $9,080. At $280 a rental, it needs about 33 rentals to do all three jobs. If it goes out 15 times a summer, it gets there in a little over two summers. If it goes out 5 times a summer, it takes more than six summers, and the rent keeps adding up the whole time.
The 10% rule can't show you that. Your books can. For more, read how to price your rentals for profit.
How much does cleaning really cost?
Cleaning is the cost owners forget most. In the profit models we build for rental owners, we use these average cleaning times per rental:
| Unit type | Cleaning time per rental |
|---|---|
| Bounce house, dry combo or inflatable game | 20 minutes |
| Dry slide | 30 minutes |
| Obstacle course | 45 minutes |
| Wet combo or water slide | 60 minutes |
Say you pay $18 an hour. Cleaning a bounce house costs about $6 a rental. Cleaning a water slide costs about $18. That $12 difference comes out of every water slide rental, so the slide needs a higher price just to keep up.
How should wind and weather cancellations show up?
Wind days are part of the business. The books just need to show what really happened.
- A deposit you refund comes off what you owe the customer. It was never income.
- A deposit you keep under your policy becomes cancellation income on the day you keep it.
- A rain-check credit is still money you owe until the customer uses it.
If the crew already loaded the truck or drove out before the call, that labor still counts. It just has no rental income next to it. We track that, so you can see what wind days really cost you each season. Our guide to deposits, damage waivers and cancellations walks through each one.
Where do repairs, blowers and new units go?
Patches, vinyl repairs, stakes, tarps and blower fixes are costs of keeping the fleet running. We track them so you can see how much your fleet costs to keep up each year.
New units are different. When you buy one, it's equipment, not a regular expense. We hold big purchases until the invoice is in, then record them as equipment so your CPA can decide how to handle depreciation. If you financed the unit, only the interest is an expense. The rest of each payment pays down the loan.
Should delivery count against each unit?
No. We keep delivery as its own cost, by distance, instead of loading it onto the units. A bounce house doesn't cost more to own because a customer lives 20 miles away. The trip does. When delivery is its own line, you can see whether your delivery fees and minimums are covering your drive time. Learn more about job costing labor in event rental.
