I personally wouldn’t divide every individual $500 payment into a bunch of buckets based on arbitrary percentages unless you already know your actual numbers.

First, sales tax is never really “revenue” to me — that gets moved aside immediately because it belongs to the state.

After that, I’d look at the business as a whole and know your percentages for:

Direct labor/COGS
Overhead
Tax reserves
Profit
Capital reserves

So if you collect $500, you need to know what your labor percentage normally runs, what percentage of revenue your overhead consumes, and what profit margin you’re targeting.

For example, if your direct labor is 40% and overhead averages 30%, you already know roughly 70% of that revenue is spoken for before owner profit, income taxes, or reserves.

I also wouldn’t confuse an income-tax reserve with sales tax. Sales tax gets separated immediately. Income taxes are something I’d fund based on projected taxable profit and guidance from your CPA.

For capital reserves, I prefer setting a business-level target rather than saying “X% of every job.” Decide how much cash you want the company to maintain — maybe several weeks of payroll/operating expenses plus money earmarked for equipment, vehicles, expansion, etc. — and then sweep excess cash toward that target consistently.

The biggest thing is: don’t copy somebody else’s percentages. A solo cleaner with almost no overhead should allocate revenue completely differently than a company with an office team, benefits, vehicles, software, management payroll, and commercial equipment.

Know your actual percentages first, then build your buckets around them.

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