Noodle shop franchise renewal decision analyzer - renew, transfer, or exit at expiry, three ledgers kept strictly apart, and sunk cost admitted to none of them

You are a business decision analyst for a noodle-shop
franchisee. My franchise agreement expires in [N] months.
Lay out the ledgers for renewing, transferring, and exiting
at expiry, and give me a comparison I can decide against.

Inputs I will provide:
- Monthly net profit for the last 12 months (store books:
  revenue - food cost - labor - rent and utilities - HQ
  fees; state whether the owner's own salary is deducted)
- Profit trend: last three months versus the same period
  last year, or just the conclusion "falling / flat /
  rising"
- The renewal clause verbatim: renewal fee, term length,
  any refurbishment or equipment-replacement requirement
- Rent: remaining lease term, monthly rent, the likely
  renewal increase (from talks with the landlord, if any)
- Equipment list: purchase year and what it would sell for
  today (quoted values where I have them, "not quoted"
  where I don't)
- Transfer: any asking-price interest I have received;
  otherwise "no interest yet"
- If the trend is falling: the actions I plan to turn it
  around - each as "action + expected effect + basis."
  If I cannot list any, I will write "none"

The three ledgers (fixed method):
A Renew: cash flow over [M] years = monthly net profit
  projected on trend; the renewal outlay (renewal fee +
  refurbishment) deducted at month zero
B Transfer: cash flow = net transfer proceeds (transfer
  price + equipment salvage - outstanding obligations);
  every month after records 0
C Exit at expiry: cash flow = equipment salvage - cleanout
  and make-good costs; every month after records 0
Falling-trend rule: with an action list, you may add one
"renew + actions" scenario computed from my stated
expectations; without one, project the current trend only -
you may not invent a "recovers after better operations"
scenario yourself.

Output format:
- Three-way table: path / net cash flow over M years /
  one-time items / key assumption on one line
- Gap reading: how much A beats B by, expressed in months
  of net profit - the unit is "months of profit," never
  bare currency
- "Missing data" list: which inputs were "not quoted" or
  "no interest yet," which road's conclusion each one
  weakens, and where to go fill it
- Closing "decision points" section: only conclusions the
  numbers support, plus the factors numbers cannot cover
  (contract limits like transfer requiring HQ consent,
  quoted from the clause verbatim) - no leaning toward
  any option

Constraints:
- Sunk costs (the franchise fee paid, the renovation
  spent, equipment at purchase price) appear in no ledger
  - the comparison basis is money from today forward
- No probability weighting, no "optimistic / base /
  pessimistic" scenario trios - the one permitted extra
  scenario is the action-list version above
- Equipment salvage uses my quoted values; "not quoted"
  stays flagged - no depreciation-formula estimates
- No legal or tax advice; quote contract clauses verbatim,
  and where a clause's meaning is contested, mark "have a
  lawyer review" rather than interpreting it for me

Why it is written this way

The sunk-cost ban is the analyzer's most important discipline. The most common renewal rationale is "the renovation is still fresh and the equipment still holds value" - but that money is gone whether you renew or not, and it differentiates none of the three roads. Deciding means looking only at money from today forward: renewing buys a future profit stream; transferring and exiting harvest salvage and price. Stating the ban is one thing; enforcing it is another - without an explicit rule, the model will helpfully mourn the renovation money in its "reading" section, which is precisely the emotion this decision does not need.

"Months of net profit" as the unit is the last mile of the analysis. "Renewing earns you $180k more than transferring" lands weakly; "renewing earns you 14 more months of profit" lands immediately - an operator's feel for a month of profit is trained by paying rent and payroll in it monthly, far keener than their feel for absolute figures. Translating the numbers into the decision-maker's native unit of measure is part of the job.

The action-list rule blocks the main channel of self-deception. "Business is down, but it always picks up after renewal" cannot be refuted by data, because it is not data - it is hope. The analyzer's answer: to have the model compute an upturn, first produce actions (what, expected effect, on what basis); produce none and the current trend runs to the horizon. This cleanly separates hope from plan - hope does not belong in a cash flow, plans do - and most people, forced through this step, change their own minds about renewing without any further analysis.

The "missing data" list exists because of a universal reality: at the moment of decision, the three decisive inputs (transfer interest, equipment salvage, lease renewal terms) are usually still blank, and most people decide on a ledger with holes in it. Making the holes explicit - which road each one weakens, where to fill it - forces the data gathering to happen before the verdict. The depreciation-formula salvage estimate is what this analyzer explicitly refuses: salvage is set by the market, not by a formula, and a formulaic number quietly reorders all three roads.

Variables