# Other and unlabeled costs

Every other row in Item 7 tells you what it is for. The catch-all does not.
"Miscellaneous opening costs," "office supplies and misc.," "opening
assistance," "marketing supplies" — these are the rows where a franchisor put
an amount it expects a buyer to spend without naming what the buyer will spend
it on. They are the only rows in the table that cannot be checked against a
quote, because there is nothing specific to quote.

That makes the catch-all the most interesting row in a deal file and the
least interesting row on a comparison chart. Its size is a question, not a
finding. Three of the four itemised filings here that carry such a
row disclose an amount so small it rounds to zero percent of the brand's own
high total, and the fourth discloses a pair of rows worth close to a twentieth
of its high column. Neither shape settles anything. What settles it is the
schedule behind the row, and that schedule is not in the table.

## Four filings have the row, two do not

Of the six restaurant filings that itemise costs here, four print at least one
miscellaneous or unlabeled line. Two print none.

| Brand | Filing label | Low | High |
| --- | --- | ---: | ---: |
| German Doner Kebab | Office Supplies & Misc. | $1,500 | $5,000 |
| Shah's Halal Food | Marketing Supplies | $2,000 | $7,000 |
| Shah's Halal Food | Miscellaneous Opening Costs | $5,000 | $15,000 |
| The Great Greek | Opening Assistance | $500 | $2,000 |
| Döner Haus | Printing, Stationary, and Office Supplies | $1,500 | $2,500 |

Mad for Chicken's 2025 full-restaurant table and 375° Chicken 'n Fries's 2024
outlet table have no other-bucket row at all. That is not a claim that those
two openings involve no unnamed cost. It is a statement that whatever those
costs are, the filings either folded them into a named row or left them out.
A reader who treats the absence as a saving has read a silence as a zero — the
same error the [how to read Item 7](/how-to-read-item-7/) sequence guards
against at every other row.

Shah's 2024 filing is the only one here with two such rows. Added inside
that one document, they run $7,000–$22,000, which is where the injected table
below puts Shah's at 5 percent of its own $405,000 printed high. Every other
catch-all here rounds to zero against its own filing's high total. The
comparison sorts by the high estimate and is not a ranking of candour.

## Size is not the signal; the label is

The tempting reading of that table is that the catch-all is a rounding error
in three filings and a real number in the fourth. The more useful reading is
about what each label sits next to.

Shah's **Marketing Supplies** line of $2,000–$7,000 is larger at both ends
than the same filing's named **Grand Opening Campaign** of $1,000–$5,000. The
brand's opening advertising has a row of its own, and an unnamed supplies row
beside it that is bigger. Nothing in a compiled table explains what divides
them; the filing's footnote and the [grand opening](/grand-opening/) chapter
are where that boundary has to be settled, because a project budget that
funds the campaign and forgets the supplies has underfunded the launch by more
than the campaign is worth.

The same filing's **Miscellaneous Opening Costs** of $5,000–$15,000 has a high
estimate above seven of the document's other rows: real property, marketing
supplies, computer hardware and POS, insurance, licenses and permits, the
grand-opening campaign, and legal and accounting. Minnesota's public [Shah's Halal
filing](https://cards.web.commerce.state.mn.us/documents/%7B9078B29B-0000-C21E-982F-C2FDAFB07783%7D/download?contentSequence=0&documentClass=FRANCHISE_REGISTRATIONS)
is where those rows and their notes appear together. An unnamed row that
outranks the insurance row is not a rounding error in the ordinary sense of
the phrase. It is a row a buyer cannot plan against.

Great Greek's **Opening Assistance** of $500–$2,000 is the smallest high
estimate in that twelve-line 2023 table, and its label points at a service
rather than at a category of purchase. That is a different kind of vagueness
from Shah's: the reader can at least ask who provides the assistance and what
the payment buys. German Doner Kebab's **Office Supplies & Misc.** of
$1,500–$5,000 and Döner Haus's **Printing, Stationary, and Office Supplies** of
$1,500–$2,500 are the most conventional of the five, naming a thing or two and
then conceding the rest.

## What has no other row to go to

The costs that end up in a catch-all are usually the ones that belong to no
trade and no vendor category. Printed collateral and uniforms that the
[signage](/signage/) row does not cover. Small tools and opening cleaning
supplies that the [equipment](/equipment/) package treats as consumable. Bank
account setup, till float, recruiting and background checks, temporary
services during construction, keys and locks, waste hauling before the
service contract starts, delivery-platform onboarding, and the first set of
paper goods. Each is real, each is due before the first sale, and none of them
has a natural home in a fifteen-row table.

Note which of those a filing has already placed elsewhere. Great Greek's
**Utility Deposits/Licenses** row combines two payments that other filings
split, which is why the [licenses and permits](/licenses-and-permits/) chapter
warns against adding a utility deposit twice. German Doner Kebab's
**Professional Fees** of $10,000–$15,000 and **Business Licenses** of
$1,000–$5,000 already carry costs that a thinner table would push into
miscellaneous. The catch-all does not have a fixed content. Its content is
whatever the rest of that particular table left over, which is exactly why it
cannot be compared across filings.

## How to get it itemised

The row is a prompt, and the prompt has a specific answer somewhere. A
franchisor that produced the estimate produced it from something.

1. Read the Item 7 footnote for the row before reading its amount. A footnote
   that lists three examples has told you more than the dollar figure did.
2. Ask the franchisor, in writing, for the schedule the estimate was built
   from, and for the vendor categories it assumed. This is an ordinary
   pre-sale question and the answer belongs in the file next to the FDD.
3. Ask recent franchisees what landed in that row for them and what did not.
   The FTC's [FDD
   walkthrough](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/05/franchise-fundamentals-taking-deep-dive-franchise-disclosure-document)
   points buyers to current operators for exactly this kind of opening-cost
   evidence, because it is the part of the estimate a document cannot settle.
4. Check whether the cost you are worried about is already in another row.
   Marketing supplies beside a grand-opening campaign, office supplies beside
   professional fees, and opening assistance beside a training row are the
   three overlaps here.
5. Rebuild the row on the [worksheet](/item-7-worksheet/) as named lines with
   your own quotes, and keep the filing's single figure in the filing's
   column. Do not overwrite the disclosure with your reconstruction.
6. Put every reconstructed line on the pre-opening calendar. The
   [soft costs](/soft-costs/) chapter groups the catch-all with professional
   fees, training, insurance, and licenses for that reason: these invoices
   arrive together, before the first loan draw for hard costs.

The SBA's [startup-cost
worksheet](https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/plan-your-business/calculate-your-startup-costs)
is a reasonable frame for the rebuild because it separates one-time from
monthly. Most of what a miscellaneous row contains is one-time and pre-opening.
Some of it — waste hauling, paper goods, cleaning supplies — becomes monthly
the week after opening, and that half belongs in the
[working capital](/working-capital/) model rather than in the opening estimate.

## When a large catch-all is a real finding

A catch-all can be large enough to change the reading of a whole table. It has
not happened here, where the biggest single such row is Shah's
$5,000–$15,000, but the test does not depend on the amount. Ask what share of
the filing's own high column the unnamed rows carry, and then ask whether the
named rows are unusually few. A short table with a wide miscellaneous line is
describing the same project as a long table with none; only one of them lets
the reader see it.

The [what the range hides](/what-the-range-hides/) chapter treats bundling as
the main obstacle to comparison, and a catch-all is bundling without even a
category name. Great Greek's **Restaurant Package** of $225,964–$248,560 is a
bundle whose contents are at least gestured at by the word "restaurant"; the
[restaurant package](/restaurant-package/) chapter keeps it whole for that
reason. A miscellaneous row gestures at nothing.

Treat the row as the franchisor's own admission that the table is not
exhaustive. That is a useful thing to have in writing. It tells the buyer to
build a named schedule of small pre-opening purchases, price it against real
vendors in the actual market, and stop expecting the filing's low and high to
close around it.

---
HTML: https://donerhandbook.com/other-and-unlabeled-costs/