Liquor Store Acquisition & SBA Financial Model

A professional Excel and Google Sheets financial model built for liquor and package store buyers. Underwrite the deal, size the SBA 7(a) loan and present bank-ready numbers to your lender or investor. Includes a gross-profit-by-category engine, inventory turns, SBA 7(a) and DSCR, a 5-year pro forma, three scenarios and a one-page dashboard.

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Most liquor-store templates are startup or operating forecasts, and most brokers headline a big revenue number. But a package store’s revenue is inflated: tobacco (about 12% of sales at a razor-thin margin) and lottery/ATM (pass-through commission) make up roughly 15% of the revenue and only about 6.5% of the gross profit. Pay a multiple on that revenue and you overpay. This model reads the store the way a disciplined buyer and an SBA lender do — on gross profit and normalized SDE.

The gross-profit-by-category engine. Spirits, wine, beer, tobacco, lottery/ATM and other each carry their own gross margin and build gross profit bottom-up (blended gross margin about 25% on a $2.6M store). Spirits and wine are roughly 68% of the gross profit; tobacco and lottery inflate the revenue but barely move the profit. You see exactly where the money is.

The honesty a broker’s sheet skips. The model recognizes shrinkage (2% of revenue — theft, breakage, receiving errors) as an explicit line; it hires a market manager to replace the owner who works 60-70 hours a week behind the counter; and it prices on the SDE after those, not the seller’s owner-free, shrink-free number. The result is the true DSCR (1.33x on the base case) shown next to the naive broker DSCR (1.96x). The gap is the manager and the shrink.

Inventory at cost, outside the price. A package store’s inventory (about $464k at roughly 87 days on the base store) is real capital the buyer funds on top of the goodwill, sized from your inventory turns and carried in Sources & Uses. A license toggle handles open/admin states ($0) versus quota states (a transferable license worth $250k-$1M+), with the appraisal-versus-price gap bridged by a seller note.

The down-case that matters. Big-box competition (Total Wine, Costco, grocery), the FTC’s 2024 price-discrimination action, and the collapse of online delivery can compress margin and volume together. A combined 250 basis-point gross-margin and 10% volume shock drops DSCR to 0.63x — well below the 1.25x floor. Profitable today; under pressure in a normal squeeze. That is the honest headline.

Inside: a 10-sheet Excel model (every calculation a formula, Google-Sheets-safe, no macros), a 24-page PDF user guide, and a benchmarks sheet with sourced ranges. Three store profiles (Balanced Neighborhood, Spirits-and-Wine Destination, Convenience-and-Tobacco) reload the multiple, working-capital peg, capex and shrink. An SBA 7(a) capital stack with a seller-note standby toggle drives the DSCR gate, and the returns are shown honestly (no IRR is printed — on one small deal it is hostage to the exit multiple). Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.

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