What changes between two filings

An Item 7 range gets read the way a menu price gets read: as a fixed property of the brand, quotable in a sentence, true until somebody announces otherwise. It is not that. It is an estimate a franchisor prepared for one document, and it is prepared again for the next document, from a year’s more information about what its buildouts actually cost. Two filings a year apart are two estimates, and the difference between them is a fact about the estimate that neither table states on its own.

Hardly anyone looks. A prospect is handed the current filing, not last year’s, and the fourteen-day clock described in the FTC’s FDD walkthrough runs on the document delivered rather than on the series it belongs to. The comparison takes two documents, an hour, and a willingness to find that almost nothing moved.

Four questions worth asking

Whether the cost estimates were revised, and by how much. Whether formats were added, dropped, or renamed, which changes what the headline range even describes. Whether the working-capital assumption moved, either in dollars or in the number of months it covers. And whether an individual line item appeared or disappeared, because a row that vanishes takes its cost somewhere else — into another label, into a footnote, or out of Item 7 altogether.

A revision is not a defect. A franchisor that has opened restaurants since its last filing has better information than it had, and moving a number to match that information is the system working. What the size and direction of the movement tells you is narrower and more useful: how settled the estimate is, and how much weight the range can carry as a planning figure.

The one Item 7 pair here that can be compared

Mad for Chicken filed on 3 May 2024 and again on 12 March 2025. The earlier document contains two Item 7 tables and the later one contains three, but only two of the three are store formats, so only two pairs can be compared at all.

Item 7 table	FDD issued 3 May 2024	FDD issued 12 March 2025
Single Full Restaurant	$320,125–$687,700	$321,125–$691,700
Single Express Model	$242,500–$466,700	$243,500–$470,700
Multi-Unit Development Agreement	not disclosed	$263,500–$711,700

In the 12 March 2025 filing the Full Restaurant is stated on 2,000–4,000 square feet and the Express Model on 750–2,000. The third table is not a format and gets its own section below.

The full restaurant’s low estimate rose by $1,000 and its high by $4,000, which is 0.3 percent and 0.6 percent. The Express Model moved by the same $1,000 and the same $4,000. Whatever was revised is therefore something both formats share, and the line items name it: Your Training Expenses went from $3,000–$6,000 to $4,000–$10,000, and every other row in the fourteen-row table is identical in both documents. One row accounts for the whole movement of both totals.

The width of the band barely moved either. The full restaurant’s high was 2.15 times its low in 2024 and is 2.15 times its low in 2025, so the range a buyer has to plan against is the same shape it was, at a very slightly higher level.

A revision this small is unremarkable, and that is the finding

There is a temptation to make $4,000 mean something. It does not mean much. On a high estimate near $690,000 it is inside the rounding a single equipment quote would move, and a franchisor that reissues a table with the same structure and nearly the same numbers is telling a reader that a year of evidence did not change its view. Treat that as the ordinary case, because it is the ordinary case.

The useful conclusion is a negative one. If the Item 7 range is where a candidate expects to see a year of change, the buyer will conclude that nothing changed. In this pair, the parts of the document that moved were somewhere else entirely. This page is how to find that out; what a revision tells you is what to do with the result once a row has been identified as the one that moved.

What moved more than the table did

Item 11 of the same two filings discloses the training obligation. Mad for Chicken’s classroom requirement was 25 hours in the 3 May 2024 filing and is 25 hours in the 12 March 2025 filing. On-the-job training went from 106 hours to 196. That is a 90-hour increase in what a franchisee and its staff must complete, against a $4,000 increase in the estimated cost of opening.

The two movements are related but not equivalent. Your Training Expenses rose by $1,000 at the low and $4,000 at the high, which is the whole of the Item 7 revision, while the obligation behind it grew by 90 hours. The training costs chapter is where the distinction lives: the Item 7 training line covers expenses such as travel and living, while the hours are an obligation whose cost lands in payroll and in the opening schedule. A 90-hour increase is a question for the working capital assumption and for whoever is being paid during those hours, and a $4,000 travel line answers neither.

The disclosed estate moved as well. Across the three Mad for Chicken filings on file, the affiliate-operated count runs 4 outlets in FY2021 and 6 in FY2022 in the 13 September 2023 filing, 6 in FY2022 and 12 in FY2023 in the 3 May 2024 filing, and 10 in FY2024 in the 12 March 2025 filing; franchised outlets run 0, 2, 3 and 2 over the same years. The 2025 filing also states inside Item 19 that four affiliate outlets and two franchised outlets were excluded from its performance table “because they closed and did not operate the full year”, and that the excluded outlets were open only two to eleven months of the year.

None of that is a cost disclosure and none of it belongs in an Item 7 comparison. It belongs in the sentence a buyer writes underneath one: the estimate moved by less than a percent while the set of restaurants the franchisor was drawing on changed materially. The whole document moved. The one table almost everybody reads did not.

The third table is a development agreement, not a third restaurant

The 2025 filing’s third table, at $263,500–$711,700, is the largest single difference between the two documents, and it is neither a revision nor a new store format. It is headed Multi-Unit Development Agreement, and it estimates what a developer spends to enter that agreement and open the first outlet under it. Its footnote says the developer “will develop the minimum of three (3) Mad for Chicken outlets”, that the $55,000 development fee rises for each additional outlet committed to, and that the low end of the range assumes the first outlet is an Express Model while the high end assumes it is a Full Restaurant.

That last sentence explains the shape of the range, which otherwise looks arbitrary. The band straddles the other two tables instead of sitting above them: its low of $263,500 is $20,000 above the Express Model’s low and its high of $711,700 is $20,000 above the Full Restaurant’s high, and at 2.70 times low to high it is the widest of the three. The $20,000 at each end is the gap between a $35,000 initial fee and a $55,000 development fee, against which the 2025 filing credits $10,000 for each outlet developed.

Do not divide it by three. Divided by the three-outlet minimum, $263,500–$711,700 becomes $87,833–$237,233 an outlet, and the high end of that is below the low end of the Express Model in the same document. The filing is not contradicting itself. Only the first outlet is inside the table; the second and third are funded when they are built, at whatever they then cost.

Doner Shack’s filing of 29 April 2025 is the matched pair for exactly this mistake, seven weeks later and in another brand’s document. Its Item 7 gives $498,000–$1,007,000 for a single restaurant and $578,000–$1,087,000 for a three-restaurant development agreement, which is $80,000 more at both ends. Divided by three that is $192,667–$362,333 an outlet, again below the same table’s single-restaurant low. Two franchisors, two 2025 documents, one reading error available in both, and in both cases the giveaway is the same: a development range that is only tens of thousands of dollars above the single-unit range cannot be the cost of three buildouts. Reading a multi-unit Item 7 works both tables through in full.

For the year-over-year comparison, the practical consequence is narrow. A table that appears in the later filing and not the earlier one is an addition, not a movement, and a table describing a development commitment is not comparable to a single-restaurant table in either document. Format drives the total is the longer version of that discipline — pair like with like, never a low from one table with a high from another.

The franchise fee moved in a similar way: not in amount, but in the number of prices. The initial fee is $35,000 in both filings and the royalty is 5 percent in both. Item 5 of the 2025 filing additionally discloses three discretionary discounts on that fee: $20,000 for an existing franchisee in good standing opening an additional outlet, $20,000 for a current restaurant owner converting an existing business subject to financial and operational review, and $5,000 for an existing franchisee opening a limited-menu satellite restaurant in a non-traditional location inside its territory. A candidate who meets none of them still pays $35,000, which is why the franchise fee chapter treats a discounted low column as a statement about a class of buyer rather than a price cut — the same reading The Great Greek’s $35,550 low needs.

What these pages cannot show you

German Doner Kebab has five filings on file, issued 7 February 2018, 19 August 2021, 20 July 2023 and 3 September 2024, plus the copy registered with the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions on 24 September 2025, and only the 2024 Item 7 table has been read into the cost pages. So the changes visible across that series are elsewhere in the document: the financial performance representation was absent in 2018 and 2021, was introduced in 2023, was kept in 2024 and was dropped again in 2025, and the principal business address in the 2024 filing, in Auburn Hills, Michigan, is not the Massachusetts address Item 19 of the 2023 filing gave for reports. The Item 7 movement across those five documents is simply not something this page can report.

Döner Haus has two documents on file, one from 2024 and one issued 7 April 2026, and the row and line items published here come from the 2026 document alone. No year-over-year Item 7 comparison is published for it either.

And there is no verified example here of an individual Item 7 row appearing or disappearing between two filings of the same offering. That check — the fourth of the four questions — is one a reader has to run on the two documents in hand. If a row is gone, the cost usually is not; it has moved under another label, into a footnote, or outside the table, which is what what Item 7 excludes is about.

How to run the comparison

1. Confirm the two documents are the same offering, the same format and the same franchisor entity before subtracting anything. That check has its own chapter, diffing the same offering, and it disqualifies more pairs than it clears.
2. Write both issuance dates at the top of the sheet and keep them attached to every figure underneath.
3. Compare like format to like format, and first establish that each table is a format at all rather than a development-agreement or minimum-commitment total. Where a table exists in only one of the two filings, record it as an addition or a removal, not as a change.
4. Put the two low columns side by side and the two high columns side by side. The low column and the high column move for different reasons and a net change hides both.
5. Check the additional-funds row for a change in dollars and, separately, for a change in the stated period. Three months and six months are not the same reserve, whatever the dollars do.
6. List every row present in one filing and absent in the other, and find where the cost went.
7. Read Item 5, Item 6, Item 8 and Item 11 in both documents. In the Mad for Chicken pair that is where the movement was.
8. Only then decide whether the revision is large enough to change a budget. Usually it is not, and the sheet is still worth the hour, because the answer was not knowable in advance.

A first filing has none of this available, and a brand-new offering’s Item 7 is a different kind of document to read; a first Item 7 takes that case. For two brands in the same year rather than one brand in two years, comparing two Item 7 tables is the method, and its first step is the same disqualification.

The reason to do the comparison is not that it usually finds something. It is that the alternative is treating a dated estimate as a constant. An Item 7 range is what one franchisor thought on one day, printed above a date, and the only way to know whether it has moved is to look at the day before.