Maximising commercial profits

[TroyParry74]

I played this game for almost a year before I decided to take it serious and create a spreadsheet to figure out which items yield the most profits, and figure out the best way to queue my items (see the 2 attachments below).

Some things to note:

I'm level 53, all the commercials buildings are upgraded to the highest level with the exception of Fast Food Restaurant (level 57 required), and Home Appliances (level 61 required). The times I use in the spreadsheet are for my current commercial building levels.

Farmers Market is a bottleneck. Flour Bag is a popular item, it's quick to build and also yields a decent profit, and only requires industrial items.

Fast Food and Donut Shop rely heavily on Farmers Market, and most Farmers Market products are long duration. To make matters worse, their profit margins aren't as good as other items, so Fast Food is mostly idle.

Donuts only rely on 1 commercially produced item, which is the Flour Bag. The Flour Bag itself has a good profit margin, but you can extend that profit by producing donuts at the expense of 1 Sugar and Spice.

My spreadsheet is split into a left and right side.

The left side is for my day time builds, i'm online often enough to queue more items.

The right side is my overnight builds, I try and keep at least 6 hours of production active, and utilize all of my slots.

Note that not all items have the same profit margins. Even though you might have 6 x 1hr items queued, it may produce less profit than 12 x 30 min items, so take note of the "item profit" column (i.e., the amount of additional income you would have if you produced that item, as opposed to selling all the items that the item requires).

The "Tot Build" column includes the build time for industrial items (such as Metal). This is an important factor, since it's often a bottleneck.

My "Item (Day)" column highlights items in green that i've decided to produce all day. They yield decent profits and keep most of my commercial buildings active. 

The lighter green items are for when I have enough of the dark green items, i'm able to produce other items to keep other commercial buildings active.

My "item (overnight)" column mostly selects longer build products so they can keep my commercial buildings for at least 6 hours.