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Handing over note for a shop: format and samples

Tunde closes at 8pm. Blessing opens at 8am. They haven't spoken since Tuesday. At 10am a woman walks in and says she paid ₦42,000 by transfer last night and was told to come back for her goods this morning. Blessing has never seen her. There's a carton under the counter with no name on it. Tunde's phone is off because he's asleep. Everything Blessing needs to know is in Tunde's head. A handing over note is how it gets out of his head and onto the counter before he goes home. Most handing over note samples you'll find are for offices: someone going on leave, someone resigning, a list of files and passwords. A shop hands over different things. Cash. Keys. Goods that belong to a customer who hasn't collected them. This article gives a format for that, with two samples you can adapt. What a shop note has to carry A good note answers the questions the next person would ask if you were standing in front of them. Money. How much is in the drawer, and what happened to the rest. This is the line that protects both of you. If you write "Float ₦10,000" and they count ₦10,000 in the morning, neither of you can be blamed for the other's shortage. Things kept aside. Any goods that are paid for and not collected, or reserved and not paid for. Say whose they are, where they are, and whether money has been received. People expected. For example, a customer coming to collect, a supplier coming to deliver, or the owner sending someone for cash. Money owed today. Anyone who took goods on credit and promised to pay tomorrow. The next person should know to ask. What ran out or is running low. So nobody promises a customer something the shop doesn't have. What's broken or behaving badly. The POS that hangs, the freezer that tripped, the tap that won't close. Anything unfinished. A delivery half counted, a shelf half packed. Leave out the story of your day. "It was very busy and I was tired" helps nobody. The test for every line is whether the next person will do something different because they read it. The format Rule a page in an exercise book kept for the purpose, one page per handover. A loose sheet gets lost. A book keeps every note in order, which matters later. Write "None" where there's nothing to report. A blank line could mean nothing happened, or that you forgot. Sample one: the end of a shift Here's an example. The details are invented. This is Tunde's note for Blessing. Now run Friday morning again. The woman walks in. Blessing has read the note. She asks her name, gives her the carton, and writes "Collected, 10:05am" beside the line. It took a minute, and nobody had to wake Tunde. Notice what the note does for Tunde too. It says the transfer was confirmed in the bank app, not just shown on the customer's phone. If that alert had been fake, the note would show he checked. More on that in fake transfer alerts. Sample two: going on leave A longer absence needs a longer note, because the person covering can't ask you tomorrow. Add what you'd otherwise carry in your head for a week or two. Chinedu receives the stock and is travelling for ten days. Amaka is covering. Before a leave handover, walk the other person through it once, in the store room, with the note in hand. Ten minutes together finds the line you forgot to write. Habits that make it stick Write it before you count your transport money. The note is the last job of the shift, not something to do from the bus. The person taking over signs too. Signing means "I've read this and the float is what it says". If the count is different, they write the figure they found beside yours, and tell the owner at once. Tick lines off as they're dealt with. Collected, delivered, paid. By the afternoon the note shows what's still open. Owners should read the book weekly. Ten minutes on a Sunday. You'll see which faults keep coming back and which staff write notes that are useful. Keep it next to the checklists. The opening and closing checklist is the same every day. The note is what was different today. The opener reads both. A note isn't a way to pass on blame. If something went wrong on your shift, say so plainly in the note. A shortage that's reported at 8pm by the person who found it is a very different thing from one discovered at 8am by someone else. An exercise book does this job well for one shop. When staff change shifts often, or you want to read the notes without being in the shop, it gets harder. In Tabs, the shop software we're building, each shift can leave a note for the next. Tabs hasn't launched yet. The book beside the till works from tonight.

By Tabs Team · Oct 8, 2026

  • Shop opening and closing checklist you can copy

    You open the shop yourself most days, so you've never written down how. You count the float without thinking. You know the freezer hums a certain way when it's working. You know which socket not to use. Then you travel for a burial, your sales girl opens for three days, and you come back to a freezer of spoiled chicken and a drawer that's ₦6,000 short with no one able to say which day it happened. Nothing she did was careless. The routine was in your head, and she can't follow a list she's never seen. An opening and closing checklist is that routine, written down once. The checklists online are mostly written for shops abroad, with alarm codes and card machines and nothing about a generator. The two below are written for a shop that takes cash, transfers and POS, and loses power most days. Copy them, then cross out what doesn't apply and add what's missing. The opening checklist Do these in order. The first three happen before a single customer is served. Look before you unlock. Check the padlocks, the door and the windows. If anything looks forced, don't go in. Call the owner. Put the power on. NEPA if there's light, the generator if not. Check the fuel level and write it down. Check the fridge and freezer. Are they cold? If the freezer went off in the night, find out now, while the goods can still be saved or moved. Count the float. Count the cash left in the drawer for change, and write the amount at the top of today's page in the sales book. If it doesn't match what last night's page says was left, stop and say so before you sell anything. Switch on the POS terminal. Check it has charge, network and paper. Check the phone that receives alerts. It should be charged and have data. A transfer you can't confirm is a sale you can't safely release. Read the note from yesterday. Whoever closed should have left one: goods kept aside, customers expected, anything that broke. Walk the shelves. Fill the gaps from the store room, turn labels to face out, and put back the price tags that fell. Sweep the front and put out the sign. Start today's page. Date, your name, the float. Then open. For a shop with one or two staff, that's about fifteen minutes. If you open at 8am, the person opening needs to arrive at 7:45, and the duty roster should say so. The closing checklist Closing matters more than opening, because it's when the day's money is counted. Don't let it be rushed because people want to catch a bus. Serve the last customer, then lock the door. Count with the door shut. Add up the day's sales in the sales book, by cash, transfer and POS. Count the cash. Take away the float. What's left should equal the cash sales, less anything paid out of the drawer during the day. Check the transfers. Open the bank app, not the SMS inbox, and tick each transfer in the book against a credit that has really landed. If one is missing, write the customer's name and what they took beside it. Print the POS end-of-day summary and compare it with the POS sales. Clip the slip to the page. Write down credit sales in the debtors' book, with names. Decide the float for tomorrow and write it at the bottom of the page. The rest of the cash goes where the owner has said it goes: the bank, the POS agent, or the owner's hand. Never left in the drawer. Check the fridge and freezer are shut and running, or packed with ice if there will be no power overnight. Switch off what should be off, such as the generator, the air conditioner, the iron in the back and sockets you don't need. Leave on what must stay on. Put the POS terminal and the alert phone on charge. Write the note for tomorrow. What's unfinished, what's kept aside for whom, what ran out. Lock the store room, the back door, the front door. Pull each padlock to be sure. Hand over the keys the way the owner has said. Sign the page. Whoever closed writes their name, the cash they counted and the time. Steps 2 to 6 are the daily close. They're set out with a worked example in the daily sales record book format. Step 4 is the one people skip, and it's the one that catches a fake transfer alert on the same day, not at month end. Make it yours These are starting lists. Your shop has things mine doesn't. For example, a pharmacy adds a check that the controlled-drugs cupboard is locked and the fridge temperature is written down. A phone shop adds counting the display phones against yesterday's number, morning and night. A boutique adds the fitting room and the mannequins in the window. A frozen foods shop moves the freezer to the very top of both lists. Keep each list to what one person can do in fifteen to twenty minutes. If yours runs to thirty items, some of them are weekly jobs, not daily ones. Move those to a separate list for Mondays. Write items a person can check. "Check POS" can be ticked by someone who glanced at it. "POS has charge, network and paper" can't. Getting it done, not just ticked A checklist that gets ticked from memory at 8:05am is decoration. A few habits make it real. Put it where the work is. Laminate the two lists and tie them beside the till, with a marker on a string. Opening on one side, closing on the other. Ask for numbers, not ticks. The float, the fuel level, the cash counted and the POS total are all figures. A figure has to be looked at to be written down. A tick doesn't. Have the closer and the opener be different people where you can. If Tunde locks up and writes "float ₦10,000", and Blessing opens and counts ₦10,000, you have two people agreeing on a number every single day. If they don't agree, you know by 8am, and you know it's one night's problem. Read the page yourself. Once a day when you can, once a week at the least. The first time staff see that you noticed a missing fuel reading, the list becomes real. Add to it when something goes wrong. Every item on a good closing list is there because of a bad morning. When the freezer spoils or the back door is found open, don't shout. Add a line. What the checklist is not It's not a list of someone's duties. It covers the first and last fifteen minutes of the day. What a sales assistant does in between belongs in a written list of duties. It's not a stock count. Walking the shelves in the morning finds gaps to fill. It doesn't tell you whether goods are missing. For that you need a count. And it doesn't replace the note between shifts. The list is the same every day. The note is what was different about today, and it's covered in the handing over note format. A laminated card is enough for one shop. With several staff on different shifts, it gets harder to see who really did which list. We're building shift checklists into Tabs, our shop software, so each shift gets its own copy to tick. It hasn't launched yet, and the card beside the till works today.

  • Staff attendance register format, with a sample week

    It's the 28th and you're working out salaries. You're sure Chinedu missed two days this month. He says one, and that the other was the day you sent him to Mile 12 for tomatoes. You honestly can't remember. Neither can he, not with certainty. You'll either pay him for a day he may not have worked or dock him for a day he may have. One of you will feel cheated, and nothing in the shop can settle it. An attendance register settles it. It's a book where each person writes the time they arrived and the time they left, every day, and signs. The format takes two minutes to rule. The templates online are mostly spreadsheets built for companies, with employee numbers, departments and percentage formulas. A shop with four staff needs a hardcover notebook, a pen tied to it with string, and seven columns. The format Use one page for each day. Write the day and date at the top. Time in and Time out are written by the person, in their own hand, at the moment they arrive or leave. Sign is their signature or initials beside each time. Remark is for the owner or manager only, for things such as late with permission, sent on an errand, sick or half day. At the bottom of each page, leave a line: "Checked by", with a signature. That's for whoever is in charge that day. Some shops rule the book the other way, with one page per person and a line per day. That's fine for a month's summary, but it makes it easy to fill in a whole week on Friday. One page per day is harder to fake, because the names go down the page in the order people really arrived. A sample day Here's an example. The names are invented. The shop opens at 8am. Monday 12 October. Checked by: Mrs Ade. Three things on that page are worth copying. Amaka has a line even though she didn't come. Her day off is written down, with the reason. An empty row with no remark would leave you wondering next month whether she was off or absent. Tunde's lateness is recorded as a fact, with what he said about it. The remark doesn't say "always late" or "warned". It says what happened. Whether twenty minutes matters is a separate conversation, and a fairer one when it's had with a month of pages open on the table. And the times aren't round. 7:44, 7:58, 12:20. A page where everyone arrived at exactly 8:00 every day wasn't written at the door. The monthly summary At the end of the month, turn to a fresh page and count up. This is the page you use for salaries. October, 26 working days. Rostered is how many days the duty roster had them down to work. Count attendance against that, not against the calendar. Someone rostered for 21 days who came for 20 missed one day, not five. Now go back to the argument with Chinedu. The register shows two days he wasn't in. One has a remark in your writing: "Sent to Mile 12, 6am." That one counts as present, and the summary should be corrected to say so. The other has no remark and no call. You were both half right, and it took a minute to find out. Look at Tunde as well. Never absent, late four times. A salary conversation that only counts absences would miss that entirely. Keeping the book honest A register is only worth having if the times in it are true. A few rules keep them that way. Each person writes their own line. Nobody signs for a friend who is "just around the corner". Make this the one rule with no exceptions. The book stays at the till, in the open. Not in a drawer, not in the store room. People write more carefully when others can see the page. Draw a line under the last name at opening time. At 8am, whoever is in charge rules a line across the page. Anyone who signs below it arrived after opening, whatever time they write. Use pen, and never tear out a page. Number the pages when you buy the book. A mistake is crossed out with one line and initialled. Sign the page yourself each day. The "Checked by" line is your part. If you're away, the most senior person signs, and you look through the week when you're back. Write remarks the same day. "Sick, called at 7am" written on the day is a record. Written three weeks later, it's a guess. Keeping it fair The same book that protects your payroll can sour a shop if it's used as a stick. Decide the rules before the book starts, and say them out loud to everyone at once. What counts as late. How much notice you want for a day off. What happens after the third lateness in a month. People accept rules they heard beforehand far more easily than ones they meet on payday. Apply them to everybody, including your cousin and the manager you trust most. Record errands and overtime as carefully as lateness. If Blessing stays until 6pm to finish a delivery, the time out says 6:00 and the remark says why. A book that only ever notes what staff did wrong will be resented, and resented books get "lost". Be careful with deductions. Whether and how you can take money from a worker's pay for lateness or absence is a matter of law, not just of what feels fair, and getting it wrong can cost more than the hours did. The article on staff theft sets out what the Labour Act says about deductions for loss, and for anything beyond a simple case you should ask a lawyer. This is general information, not legal advice. Put attendance in writing when you hire. If the agreement says what the working hours are and that a register is kept, nobody is surprised by it later. What the register is good for beyond pay Open the book next to your sales book once in a while. The days when money or stock didn't balance all have a page here showing exactly who was in the shop, and from when to when. That doesn't prove anything about anyone. It does stop you suspecting someone who was off that day. It also shows you patterns you'd otherwise only feel. The person who is late every Monday. The week when everyone left at 4:00 sharp because you were away. The one who has not missed a day in six months and has never been thanked for it.

  • Staff duty roster format for a shop, with a filled-in week

    On Thursday night you tell Blessing she's opening on Saturday. On Saturday at 8am the shop is locked, Blessing says you told her Sunday, and the customer who came for two cartons of noodles has gone next door. Nobody lied. The roster was in your head, and a roster in your head is one that each person remembers differently. A duty roster is a page that says who works when, and doing what. Pinned where everyone can see it, it ends that argument before it starts. Most of the duty roster formats you'll find were made for schools, hospitals and offices. A shop needs something simpler, with one thing those formats leave out: what each person is there to do. The format Rule one page for each week. Put the names down the side and the days across the top. In each box, write the hours and the duty. At the top of the page, write the week it covers and who drew it up. At the bottom, leave a line for each person to sign that they've seen it. Three rules make the format work. Write real hours. "Morning" means 7am to one person and 9am to another. Write 8 to 4. Write the duty. In a shop of four, somebody has to open, somebody is on the till, somebody receives the delivery and somebody locks up. If the roster doesn't say who, each of them will assume it's another person. Write OFF in the box for a day off. An empty box looks like a mistake. OFF looks like a decision. A filled-in week Here's an example. The names and hours are invented. The shop is a provision store that opens from 8am to 8pm, Monday to Saturday, and from 12pm to 6pm on Sunday. It has four staff. Week of Monday 12 October. Drawn up by: Mrs Ade. Read down any column and you can see the day. On Monday, Blessing opens and runs the till, Chinedu receives the delivery, and Tunde arrives at noon and locks up. From noon to 4pm there are three people in the shop, which is on purpose: that's when it's busiest. Read across any row and you can see the person's week. Everyone has at least one day off. Nobody locks up at 8pm and opens at 8am the next morning more than they have to. Check it before you pin it up A roster takes ten minutes to write and two minutes to check. Do the checking. Every day has someone who opens and someone who locks. Run your finger down each column and find both words. In the sample, Sunday has only two people, so Amaka does both. The busy hours have enough hands. You know when your shop fills up. Count the people in those hours. Delivery days have a receiver. If your drinks supplier comes on Monday, Thursday and Friday, somebody is down for it on those three days. Nobody is in two places. With two shops, this is the mistake that happens most. Write one roster for both shops on the same page, so a name can't appear twice in one column. Days off are shared fairly. If the same person works every Sunday, they've noticed, even if you haven't. Everyone has a way home. A sales girl who lives two buses away shouldn't be the one locking up at 8pm every night. Then pin it up by Friday for the week that starts on Monday, and send a photo of it to the staff group. Have each person sign the bottom. A signature isn't about distrust. It turns "you didn't tell me" into something that can be settled by looking at a page. When the week changes It will. For example, someone falls sick, a delivery moves, or there's a burial in the village. Change the paper, not only the plan. Cross out the old entry with one line so it can still be read, write the new one beside it, and initial it. Tell the people affected yourself. A roster that has been corrected three times in pen is still better than one nobody trusts. Let staff swap between themselves only if they tell you first and the roster is changed. Two people who swap quietly leave you with a page that says one thing and a shop that does another. If money or stock goes missing that day, your record now points at the wrong person. Keep the old pages. Clip each finished week behind the new one. At the end of the month they tell you who really worked which days, which helps when salaries or an attendance register are questioned. What a roster won't do It says who should be there. It doesn't say who came. For that you need an attendance register, which is a separate book. It doesn't tell anyone how to do the job. The duty in the box is one or two words. What "opens" involves belongs on an opening and closing checklist, and what the job as a whole involves belongs in a written list of duties. And it doesn't settle how many hours a person may work or how much rest they're owed. That's between you, your staff and the law. If you're unsure, ask a lawyer before you draw up a pattern you mean to keep. Paper is enough for one shop with a steady week. It starts to strain when you run two shops, or when the pattern changes often and you find yourself redrawing the page every Friday. We're building a weekly roster into Tabs for that case. Tabs is ours, and it hasn't launched yet. The page above works without it.

  • How much does it cost to start a mini supermarket in Nigeria?

    Search for this and you'll find answers from ₦500,000 to ₦20 million. They can't all be describing the same shop, and they aren't. A kiosk-sized provision store in Ilorin and an air-conditioned mini mart in Lekki share a name and almost nothing else. So instead of handing you one figure, this guide shows where the money goes and how to work out your own number. What published estimates say Nobody publishes official data on the cost of opening a small shop in Nigeria. What exists are estimates from people who sell to shop owners. One of the more detailed is from SwiftPOS, a Nigerian point-of-sale company. Its June 2026 guide puts a mini mart in a major city at roughly ₦3 million to ₦10.8 million, broken down like this: SwiftPOS says the figures reflect Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Ibadan, and that smaller towns come in 20 to 40% lower. They are that company's own estimates, not survey data, and it sells POS systems. Treat the table as a checklist of what to budget for, not as a quote. The useful thing in it is the shape. Stock and rent are most of the money. Everything else is small beside them. The three numbers that decide your total Rent, and how many years the landlord wants. This is the biggest swing. The same size of shop can cost several times more on a busy road than inside an estate, and many landlords ask for one or two years upfront, plus agency and agreement fees. Get the real figure for the actual shop before you budget anything else. How much you put on the shelves. Opening stock is where new owners overspend. A full-looking shop feels safe, so they buy a little of everything, and three months later half of it hasn't moved. Power. If you plan to sell cold drinks and frozen food, you need a freezer and a way to keep it running. A generator or inverter, and the fuel or batteries to feed it, can cost more than your shelves. Building your own budget Take a sheet of paper and get real quotes for each line. Don't use anyone's range, including the one above. Premises. Rent for the period demanded, agency fee, agreement fee, any deposit. Fitting. Shelves, counter, signboard, painting, lighting, burglar-proofing. Ask a carpenter and a welder for prices, and look at used shelving. Cold storage and power. Only what your product range needs. Opening stock. See the next section. Registration. Business name registration, local government permits and any levies for your area. Ask a shop owner on the same street what they actually pay each year. Selling equipment. A POS terminal for card payments, a calculator, a receipt booklet. Barcode scanners and software can come later. Running costs for three months. Salaries, fuel, data, transport. A new shop rarely covers its costs in the first weeks. A reserve. Money you don't plan to spend. Something will cost more than quoted. Add it up. That's your number, and it's more reliable than any article's. Spend less on opening stock than you think Stock is the one line you can deliberately shrink without hurting the shop. Start narrow. Walk the area and write down what the nearest shops sell most and what people have to travel for. Open with the everyday items every household buys, in modest quantities, and add lines as customers ask. Keep a third of your stock budget back as cash. In the first month you will learn what your customers really want, and it won't match your guess. The money you held back buys more of what's selling. Buy fast sellers by the carton and unknowns by the half-dozen. A slow item you bought six of is a lesson. A slow item you bought six cartons of is a problem. If it happens anyway, here is what to do with goods that won't sell. The cost nobody budgets for Almost no start-up guide lists losses. But a new shop with new staff, no records and an owner busy with everything else is at its most exposed. Goods get miscounted on delivery, prices get guessed, and small items walk. You prevent this with habits, not money, and it's far easier to start them on day one than to introduce them in month six: A written price list before the first sale. A sales record book from the first day, closed every evening. A stock record for your top items, started from the opening delivery. A weekly count of the goods most worth taking. The opening delivery is the only time in the shop's life when you know exactly what's on the shelves, because you just paid for all of it. Write it down then. Every shop that didn't wishes it had. So, how much? For a small neighbourhood shop in a low-rent area, selling dry goods from simple shelves, the total can be modest. For a fitted, cooled mini mart on a busy road in a big city, it runs to many millions, mostly in rent and stock. Your figure sits wherever your rent, your range and your power needs put it. Get the rent quote first. Then decide how narrow you can start. Those two choices set most of the bill. For running the shop once it's open, see how to run a successful provision store.

  • Daily sales record book format, with a sample page

    The sales book templates you find online were mostly designed for a shop that takes cash. A Nigerian shop takes cash, bank transfers and POS, often all three within ten minutes. A book with one "Amount" column can't tell you why the money in the drawer is ₦40,000 less than the sales total, when the answer is simply that ₦40,000 came in by transfer. So the format needs one more column than the usual template: how the customer paid. The format Start a new page every day. Write the date at the top and the name of whoever opened the shop. No. numbers the sales from 1 each day. Price is the price for one. Amount is quantity times price. Paid by is Cash, Transfer, POS or Credit. Sold by is the initials of the person who made the sale. A sample page Here's an example. The figures are invented. The mix of payments is typical. Monday 5 October. Opened by: CN. At the bottom of the page, add it up by payment type: Closing the day This is the part that makes the book worth keeping. It takes about ten minutes. Cash. Count the drawer. Take away the float you started with. What's left should equal the cash total, less anything paid out of the till during the day. Transfers. Open the bank app and add up the day's credit alerts. They should equal the transfer total. Every alert should match a line in the book, and every transfer line should have an alert. POS. Print or view the terminal's end-of-day summary. It should equal the POS total. Credit. Copy each credit sale into your debtors' list with the customer's name. Credit is a sale, but it is not money yet. Sign. Whoever closed writes the three figures they found and signs the page. If cash is short, you'll see it tonight, while everyone still remembers the day. If a transfer line has no alert, you'll see that too. Customers do sometimes show a "successful" screen for a payment that never arrives, and tonight is a better time to find out than the end of the month. Money that leaves the till Shops pay for things out of the drawer all day, such as a loader, fuel for the generator, water, or change borrowed for a neighbour. If those aren't written down, the cash will never balance and nobody will be able to say why. Keep a small box at the bottom of each page headed "Paid out", with what it was for, the amount, and who took it. Then the cash check becomes: float, plus cash sales, minus paid out, equals what's in the drawer. The mistakes that spoil it Writing "sundries ₦6,000" for a group of items. The sales book feeds your stock record, and "sundries" can't be taken off any shelf. Write the items. Recording a credit sale as cash "because she always pays". She may. Until she does, the drawer will be short by exactly that amount. Leaving the Sold by column empty. When each sale carries a name, a shortage has a starting point and honest staff aren't under the same cloud as everyone else. There is more on that in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. Skipping the close because the shop was busy. A busy day is the day the check matters most. The sales book tells you what money should exist. Its partner is the stock record book, which tells you what goods should exist. Each day's sales lines are what you post into the stock pages, one total per item.

  • Debtors book format: how to record customers who owe you

    Ask a shop owner how much customers owe them and you'll usually get a pause, then a guess. The real figure is spread across the back pages of the sales book, a few scraps of paper, and memory. That's why credit hurts small shops so badly. It isn't that people never pay. It's that nobody is keeping score, so nobody is asked. A debtors book fixes that. It needs six columns and one rule. The rule One page per customer. Not one list for everyone. On a shared list you can see that somebody took ₦3,000 of goods on Tuesday. On their own page you can see that this is the fifth time this month, they haven't paid anything since the 2nd, and they now owe ₦19,000. The format At the top of each page write the customer's name, phone number, where they live or work, and the credit limit you have agreed for them. Details says what they took, or how they paid. Taken is the value of goods collected on credit. Paid is money received. Balance is what they owe after this line. Sign is the initials of whoever served them. For large amounts, have the customer sign too. A page filled in Here's an example. The figures are invented. Customer: Mrs Tobi Adewale. Phone: 0800 000 0000. Address: Block 4, Flat 2. Credit limit: ₦20,000. One glance tells you everything. She buys often, she pays in full at the end of the month, and she has never gone over her limit. This is a customer worth giving credit to. Now imagine the same page with nothing in the Paid column since the 9th and a balance of ₦31,000. You'd know to stop before the next carton left the shop. The summary page Keep a summary at the front of the book and update it on the last day of each month. Two numbers matter here. Total owed is money that belongs to your shop and isn't in it. Many owners find it's larger than a week's sales. Days since shows who has gone quiet. Iya Bisi is over her limit and hasn't paid in 78 days. That's the conversation to have first. How it connects to your other books A credit sale is still a sale. It goes in your daily sales record book marked "Credit", so the stock is accounted for, and it's left out of the cash you expect in the drawer. Then it's copied to the customer's page the same evening. When they pay, the payment goes in the sales book's cash or transfer total for that day, and on their page. Do the copying daily. Credit recorded "later" is where most of the leakage happens. Rules that make credit safe You choose who gets credit. Keep the list short. Staff can't add to it. Everyone has a limit. Set it at an amount you could lose without it hurting. When the balance reaches the limit, the answer is "pay something first." Nothing new while old debt is unpaid past the agreed date. Say this at the start, not during an argument. The customer sees the page. Show them the entry when they take goods. People dispute debts they never saw written down. Give a receipt for every payment. A part payment gets a receipt showing the amount paid and the balance left. See how to write a receipt. Review the summary every month. A debtors book nobody reads is just a neater way of losing money. When someone won't pay The book is your evidence and your tool. A customer shown a page with dates, items and their own signature finds it far harder to say "it wasn't that much." How to ask, what to do when asking doesn't work, and when to let a debt go are in how to collect debts from customers without losing them.

  • Do small businesses pay tax in Nigeria? What shop owners should know

    You'll have heard two things this year. One is that small businesses no longer pay tax. The other is that everyone now has to register and file. Both are passed around with confidence, and both leave out the part that matters to a shop owner. This is a plain summary of how the rules apply to a small shop. It is general information, checked against PwC's published tax summaries for Nigeria, which were last reviewed on 29 May 2026. It isn't tax advice. Tax depends on your own facts, the rules are new, and you should confirm your position with an accountant or your state revenue office. The first question: what kind of business are you? Most of the confusion comes from skipping this. A registered company. Your business is a limited company, with "Ltd" in its name. The company is a separate person in law and it pays companies income tax. A business name, or not registered at all. You registered a business name with the CAC, or you simply trade. In law, the business is you. There's no separate company. You pay personal income tax on what the business earns. Most provision stores, boutiques and phone shops are in the second group. And the well-known "0% for small companies" rule belongs to the first. If you are a company PwC's summary of corporate income tax describes small companies as those with annual gross turnover of ₦100 million or less and total fixed assets not exceeding ₦250 million. For these, the companies income tax rate is 0%. It also says the 4% Development Levy applies to companies subject to tax, except small companies and non-resident companies. So a small limited company that meets both tests pays no companies income tax. That isn't the same as having no tax duties. See "What exemption doesn't mean" below. If you are a business name or an individual trader You're taxed as a person, on your profit. Not on your sales. PwC's summary of personal income tax lists these bands for 2026: Each rate applies only to its own slice. Here's an example that ignores any reliefs or deductions you may be entitled to. Let's say your shop's profit for the year, after all business expenses, is ₦3,000,000. The first ₦800,000 is taxed at 0%. The remaining ₦2,200,000 is taxed at 15%, which is ₦330,000. That's ₦330,000 on ₦3 million, or 11% overall. If your profit for the year is ₦800,000 or less, the tax on it under these bands is nil. Personal income tax is generally handled by the revenue service of the state where you live. VAT VAT is a tax on sales that a business collects from customers and passes on. PwC's summary of other taxes gives the standard rate as 7.5% and says small businesses are exempt from collecting it. It also lists zero-rated items, including basic food items on a specific list, medical and pharmaceutical products, and books and educational materials. We haven't stated the turnover threshold for the small business exemption here, because the figures in circulation differ and we couldn't confirm one from a source we'd rely on. Ask your accountant which figure applies to you, particularly if your yearly sales run into tens of millions. What exemption doesn't mean This is where people get caught. It may not mean you can ignore registration and filing. Being charged at 0%, or falling under a threshold, is different from being outside the system. You may still be expected to hold a tax identification number and to file returns showing that you qualify. Confirm what applies to you. It doesn't cover your staff. If you employ people, there are rules on deducting tax from salaries above the exempt level and remitting it. It doesn't cover state and local charges. Business premises registration, signage fees, local government permits and market levies are separate from income tax and VAT. It doesn't last if you grow. The tests are based on turnover and assets. Cross them and the position changes. Why your records matter here Every figure above depends on a number you have to be able to show: your turnover, or your profit. A trader with no records can't prove their profit was ₦700,000 and not ₦7 million. When there are no records, an assessment may be made on estimates, and estimates rarely favour you. So the practical step for a small shop isn't complicated. Keep: a daily sales record book, which gives you turnover your supplier invoices and goods received notes, which give you purchases a list of expenses with receipts a yearly stock count, valued at cost With those four you can work out your profit, as shown in how to calculate profit and loss for a shop, and you can show how you got there. What to do this month Find out which you are: a company or a business name. Your CAC certificate says. Work out last year's turnover and profit as best you can. Take those two figures to an accountant or your state revenue office and ask three questions. What do I need to register for? What do I need to file, and when? What, if anything, do I owe? An hour with an accountant once a year costs less than one penalty, and far less than one argument with no paperwork behind you.

  • Fake transfer alerts: how to confirm a payment before goods leave the shop

    A customer picks ₦85,000 of goods, makes a transfer, and holds up their phone: "Successful." Your attendant sees the green tick, packs the goods, and the customer leaves. That evening the bank app shows nothing. It never will. Fake transfers work because shops confirm payment by looking at the customer's phone. The whole defence is one rule, applied every time, by everyone. The rule Goods leave when the money is in your account, as seen on your own bank app. Nothing else counts. Not a screenshot. Not a receipt on the customer's phone. Not an SMS. Not "check your alert, it has entered." Why the usual proof isn't proof The customer's success screen. It shows that their app displayed a message. Some are edited images. Some come from apps built to imitate a bank's screen. And some are real: the bank accepted the instruction, but the transfer later failed or was reversed. A forwarded receipt or screenshot. Images are easy to alter. A receipt is a picture of a claim. An SMS alert. Text messages can be sent to look as though they came from a bank. An SMS is a notification, and it isn't your account balance. "I've been debited." This can be true and still not be your problem to solve. A debit on their side with no credit on yours is between the customer and their bank. Until the money arrives, you haven't been paid. What does count Open your own banking app, or your business account's app, and look at the transaction list. You should see: a new credit, for the right amount the sender's name matching the person paying, or the name they gave you your balance higher than before by that amount If your POS provider or bank gives you a merchant app that shows incoming transfers as they land, that is the same thing and usually faster. Checking takes under a minute. Any customer who objects to waiting a minute while you confirm an ₦85,000 payment is telling you something. Set the shop up for it The rule fails in practice when the person at the counter has no way to check. Fix that before you need it. One account for the shop. Print the account name and number and fix it to the counter. Customers pay only into that. Never into a staff member's personal account, for any reason. Decide who confirms. Either the business phone stays in the shop with the bank app on it, or staff send you the amount and sender's name and you confirm from wherever you are. Reply with one word, so there's no confusion: "Confirmed." Give staff the words. Most attendants release goods because refusing feels rude. Give them a line they can say without embarrassment: "Our policy is that we confirm on the shop's app before we release. It takes a minute. Please bear with me." A sign at the counter saying the same thing helps, because then it's the shop's rule and not the attendant's suspicion. Write the sender's name on the receipt. When you confirm, note on the receipt and in the daily sales record book that payment was by transfer and who from, as it appears in your app. When the payment is "pending" Networks do fail, and honest customers do get debited without the money arriving. You still can't release goods on a promise. Offer choices that don't put your stock at risk: Wait a few minutes and check again. Pay another way: cash, or card on the POS. Leave the goods, kept aside with their name on them, and collect when it lands. For someone you know well, treat it as a credit sale, written in the debtors book under your normal limit. That's then your decision as the owner, not the attendant's. If the money arrives later, call them. If it's reversed back to them, nobody has lost anything. At the end of the day Every transfer line in the sales book should have a matching credit in the bank app, and the day's transfer total should equal the total of those credits. This is part of closing the day. If a line has no credit, you find out that night, while the staff remember who the customer was and what they bought. If it has already happened Collect what you have: the date and time, the amount, what was taken, any name or phone number, and CCTV footage if you have it. Report it to your bank and to the police. Then be honest with yourself about how it got through. In nearly every case, someone looked at a phone that wasn't the shop's. Don't make your staff pay for it out of their wages on your own decision. The law restricts deductions for losses, as explained in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. Fix the routine and train it. One more thing to say out loud to your team: the rule protects them too. An attendant who always confirms on the shop's app can never be accused of having waved a friend through.

  • How to arrange a provision store so that it sells

    Two provision stores on the same street can carry the same goods at the same prices and take very different money. Often the difference is simply that in one of them you can see what's for sale. Arranging a shop isn't decoration. It decides what customers notice, how fast your attendant can serve, how easily things get stolen, and whether you can count your stock in twenty minutes or two hours. First, which kind of shop is it? Most provision stores are one of two kinds, and the arrangement differs. In a counter shop, the customer stands at the front and asks, and someone inside fetches. The customer only sees what faces the counter. In a walk-in shop, customers move between the shelves and pick for themselves. This guide is mainly about the counter shop and the small walk-in. If you're fitting out something bigger, read how to arrange goods in a supermarket as well. Put things together the way people use them Group goods by what the customer is trying to do, not by what the supplier calls them. Breakfast lives together: milk, beverages, sugar, cornflakes, oats, bread. Cooking lives together: oil, tomato paste, seasoning, spaghetti, rice. Washing lives together: detergent, bar soap, bleach, sponge. Baby items get their own corner. When things that go together sit together, the customer who came for milk sees the cocoa drink beside it and remembers they're nearly out. That's the cheapest extra sale you'll ever make. It also helps your attendant. Nobody should need to walk the whole shop to fill one customer's list. Use the shelf heights Not all shelf space is equal. Eye level is where people look first. Give it to the goods you most want to sell: the ones with good profit, and your reliable fast movers. The top shelf takes light, bulky things that people ask for by name anyway, such as tissue, cereal boxes and noodles in cartons. The bottom shelf takes heavy goods. Bags of rice, cartons of drinks, kegs of oil, big tins. Nobody wants to lift a 10kg bag down from above their head, and heavy items low down keep the shelves stable. The counter is for small things people add without planning, such as sweets, biscuits, chewing gum, sachets, recharge cards and batteries. Keep small, costly items where you can see them Anything that fits in a pocket and costs real money should sit behind the counter or in a glass case, within sight of whoever is serving. Think tinned milk, baby formula, spirits, body creams and razors. Don't put these near the door. Arranging a shop well is one of the simplest protections against loss, and it costs nothing. The rest are in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. Old stock in front, always Every time you refill a shelf, pull what's there forward and put the new goods behind. If you just push new stock in at the front, the old tins sit at the back until they expire. Make this a rule for whoever restocks, and check it. Run a finger along the back of a shelf now and then and read the dates. Show the prices Put a price on the shelf edge or on the item. In a counter shop, a printed price list on the wall does the same job. Visible prices speed up serving, stop arguments, and stop anyone quoting customers a figure of their own. Make the store room match the shop If you keep cartons in a back room, arrange them in the same order as the shelves outside: breakfast goods together, cooking goods together, and so on. Leave a gap between stacks so you can read the labels. Keep cartons off the bare floor on pallets or planks, away from damp walls, and never stack so high that the bottom carton is crushed. A store room where only one person knows where things are is a store room that person controls. Arrange it so it can be counted Here is a benefit most owners miss. A shop arranged in clear sections is a shop you can count. Give each section a name and keep each product in one place only. Then a stock count becomes "do the breakfast shelf today, the washing shelf tomorrow", as described in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. If the same milk is in three places, on a shelf, under the counter and in a carton by the door, every count will be wrong. The small things Keep the floor clear. Cartons in the walkway make a shop feel cramped, and people leave cramped shops quickly. Light it properly. A dim shop looks closed from the road and hides half your goods. Dust weekly. Dust on a tin tells the customer it has been there a long time, whether or not that's true. Keep the fridge where people can see into it from the entrance. Cold drinks are bought on sight. Change it when the numbers say so Arrangement isn't a one-off job. After a month, look at what sold. If something at eye level isn't moving, give its place to something that is, and deal with it as slow-moving stock. If customers keep asking for an item you have, it's in the wrong place. The shop should end up shaped around what your customers actually buy, which you'll know from your daily sales record book, not from memory.

  • How to arrange goods in a supermarket: shelf by shelf

    In a walk-in shop the customer is the one moving, so the layout does your selling for you. A good one leads people past more of your goods, makes things easy to find, and lets one person at the till see most of the room. You don't need a designer. You need a sketch and a few rules. Draw it before you move anything Take a sheet of paper and draw the room from above: the door, the till, the walls, the power sockets, the windows. Then mark where shelves, fridges and freezers will stand. Three things are fixed and everything else works around them: Fridges and freezers go against a wall, near sockets, where you can run them from your generator or inverter without cables crossing the floor. The till goes near the door, facing into the shop, so whoever is on it sees people come in, sees the aisles, and sees people leave. The walkways need to be wide enough for two people to pass, one with a basket. Plan the route Most customers come for a few everyday things, such as bread, milk, drinks, noodles and water. If those are just inside the door, people pick them up and leave having seen nothing else. Put the things most people came for further in, and let them walk past other goods on the way. Bread and cold drinks towards the back or along the far wall is the classic arrangement. Don't overdo it. If customers can't find the basics, they get annoyed. The aim is a short, natural walk through the shop, not a maze. A simple route for a small mini mart: in at the door, toiletries and household goods on the first shelves, food and provisions in the middle, drinks and frozen goods along the back wall, then back down past snacks to the till. Keep categories whole Give each category its own run of shelving and keep it together: breakfast items, cooking ingredients, snacks and biscuits, drinks, toiletries, cleaning products, baby items, stationery. Then put neighbours beside each other. Tea next to milk and sugar. Pasta beside tomato paste and seasoning. Diapers next to wipes and baby food. Keep food away from strong-smelling goods. Soap, detergent and insecticide shouldn't share a shelf with biscuits or flour. The smell transfers, and customers notice. Hang a simple sign over each section. People stay longer in a shop where they aren't lost. Shelf heights Think of each shelf unit in four bands. Goods meant for children, like sweets and small snacks, sell best at a child's eye level, which is lower than yours. Within one product, put sizes left to right from small to large, and keep the same brand together in a block. A neat block of one product reads as plenty. One tin alone reads as leftovers. Face the shelves Every morning, pull products to the front edge of the shelf with the labels facing out, and fill gaps from behind or from the store room. A shelf that looks full sells more than one that looks picked over, even when the stock is the same. When you refill, bring the old stock forward and put the new behind, so the earliest dates sell first. The till area The space beside the till is the most valuable in the shop, because everyone stands there for a moment with their money out. Use it for small things people don't plan to buy, such as sweets, gum, chocolate, batteries, sachets, razors and phone credit. Keep the costly small items here too, behind the cashier or in a glass case: spirits, perfumes, baby formula, electronics accessories. Being able to see them is the point. Arrange for sight lines Stand at the till and look around. Any spot you can't see is where goods will disappear. Keep shelves in the middle of the room low enough to see over, or line them up so you look straight down each aisle from the till. Put taller units against the walls. If there's a blind corner you can't remove, use it for bulky low-value goods, never for cosmetics or tinned milk. Stock control starts with layout. The rest is counting and records, covered in how to manage stock in a small shop. One place for each product Decide where each product lives and keep it only there, plus its spare stock directly above or in the store room. A product shelved in two places gets counted wrong, reordered when you already have it, and left to expire in the place everyone forgot. Write your shelf plan down, section by section. It's the map your staff restock from and the list you count from. The counting method is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. Review it After the first month, check what's selling and what isn't. Move slow items out of eye level and give the space to better ones. Shrink any category that isn't earning its shelf and expand one that keeps running out. If you are still at the planning stage, the money side is in how much does it cost to start a mini supermarket in Nigeria. For a counter-service shop, see how to arrange a provision store.

  • How to become a distributor in Nigeria

    A lot of successful retailers reach the same thought: I already sell twenty cartons of this a week, why am I buying from a middleman? Becoming a distributor looks like the natural next step. It can be. It's also a different business from retail, with thinner margins, bigger sums and customers who buy on credit. This guide covers how distributorship works and how to go after one. Every manufacturer sets its own terms, and they change. Treat what follows as the general shape, and get the actual requirements from the company itself. What a distributor is Goods usually travel in a chain: the manufacturer or importer, then distributors, then wholesalers and sub-distributors, then retailers, then the customer. A distributor buys directly from the manufacturer, in large volume, usually under an agreement that covers a territory. They store the goods and sell them on to wholesalers and retailers in that area. A wholesaler buys from distributors and sells to retailers, often carrying many brands. Many big companies also recognise smaller partners under names such as sub-distributor or key retailer, with lower entry requirements. That's often the realistic first step. What companies usually look for Requirements vary, but manufacturers are generally trying to answer the same questions. Are you a proper business? Expect to be asked for CAC registration, a tax identification number, and a business bank account with statements. Can you pay? Distributors typically pay for goods before or on delivery, at least at first. Companies want evidence of working capital, and some ask for a deposit or a bank guarantee. The amounts differ widely by company and product. Can you store the goods? A warehouse or store of suitable size, secure and dry, and for some products cooled. They may inspect it. Can you move them? A delivery vehicle, or a firm arrangement for one. Do you have a market? This is where an existing retailer has an edge. A list of shops you already supply, your current volumes, and a territory you know are strong evidence. Can you keep records? Companies want sales and stock reports. A distributor who can't say what was sold last week, to whom, is a risk to them. How to apply Pick products you already understand. Brands you sell now, in an area where you know the retailers. Go to the company itself. Use the contact details on the product pack or the company's official website. Ask for the sales or trade department, or for the area sales manager for your region. Ask what categories of partner they have and the requirements for each. If full distributorship is out of reach, ask about the sub-distributor level. Prepare a short profile: who you are, where you operate, what you sell now and in what volumes, your storage and transport, and the retailers you supply. Expect a visit. They'll want to see the premises and often your current trade. Read the agreement. Look at the territory, minimum order quantities, targets, payment terms, who bears the cost of damaged and expired stock, and how either side can end it. Have a lawyer read it. Beware of distributorship scams People searching for this are a known target. Be careful of: "Agents" who say they can secure a distributorship for a fee. Requests to pay a registration or deposit into a personal account. Offers that arrive by WhatsApp or social media from someone you can't tie to the company. Forms hosted on websites that aren't the company's own. Deal only with the company's verified office and staff. Pay only into the company's corporate account, against its official invoice. If you can't confirm someone works there by calling the company's published number, they don't. How the money works The profit per carton is small. A distributor earns by turning over large volumes quickly, so everything depends on speed and control. Margin. Often only a few percent on the price, sometimes with rebates or bonuses for hitting targets. Understand exactly how you're paid before you sign. Capital tied up. You pay the manufacturer up front. Your retailers often want credit. The gap between the two is financed by you. Credit. This sinks more distributors than anything else. Decide who gets credit and how much, keep a debtors book with a page per customer, and chase on the due date. See how to collect debts from customers. Targets. Many agreements carry monthly volume targets. Missing them can cost you bonuses or the territory. Don't sign for volumes your area can't absorb. Costs. Warehouse rent, fuel, vehicle maintenance, drivers and loaders, and damaged stock all come out of that thin margin. Work out your real profit using how to calculate profit and loss for a shop. The method is the same. Stock control is the business In retail, poor records cost you some profit. At distributor volumes, they can cost you the company. Every delivery is counted and recorded on a goods received note before anyone signs. The warehouse runs on bin cards and stock cards, kept by different people. Nothing leaves without a numbered waybill or invoice. Goods on the van are counted out in the morning and reconciled in the evening against sales, cash and returns. Oldest stock goes out first, by date. The warehouse is counted on a regular cycle, and the differences are valued and investigated. Is it right for you? It suits you if you already move real volume, know the retailers in your area, have capital you can afford to tie up, and are strict about credit and records. It probably doesn't yet if you'd be borrowing most of the capital, if you have no existing customers to supply, or if your current shop's records are loose. Distribution magnifies whatever habits you bring to it. A sensible path is to grow into it: build your retail trade, start supplying a few smaller shops, tighten your records, and approach the company with numbers that make the case for you. If wholesale is the nearer step, see how to start a wholesale provision business.

  • How to calculate profit and loss for a shop, with an example

    "Is the shop making money?" sounds like a question with an obvious answer. Customers are coming, goods are leaving, there's cash at the end of the day. But plenty of shop owners in that position are slowly getting poorer, and they only find out when they can't afford to restock. The reason is that sales aren't profit, and neither is cash. To know your profit you need three numbers and about an hour at the end of each month. The three numbers Sales. Everything you sold in the month, at selling price, whether paid by cash, transfer, POS or on credit. Cost of goods sold. What those goods cost you to buy. Not what you bought this month. What you sold this month. Expenses. What it cost to keep the shop open: rent, salaries, power, transport and the rest. Then: Sales minus cost of goods sold is your gross profit. Gross profit minus expenses is your net profit. This is what the shop really earned. Cost of goods sold is the tricky one Most people get this wrong by using the month's purchases. For example, if you bought ₦1.5 million of goods in October, that isn't the cost of what you sold in October. Some of it is still on the shelf, and some of what you sold was bought in September. The fix is a stock count at the end of each month, valued at cost. Cost of goods sold = opening stock + purchases − closing stock Opening stock is what you had at the start of the month. Closing stock is what you counted at the end. Both are valued at what the goods cost you, not what you sell them for. More on these two in opening stock and closing stock. A worked example Here is one month for an imaginary provision store. Every figure is made up. Cost of goods sold = 2,400,000 + 1,500,000 − 2,450,000 = ₦1,450,000 Gross profit = 1,800,000 − 1,450,000 = ₦350,000 That's 19.4% of sales. For every ₦100 a customer hands over, about ₦19 is left after paying for the goods. Now the expenses. Net profit = 350,000 − 230,000 = ₦120,000 So a shop that took ₦1.8 million in the month earned ₦120,000. If the owner had judged by the drawer, they'd have guessed far higher. Things people leave out Rent. It's paid once a year, so it's easy to forget in the other eleven months. Divide by 12 and include it every month. Your own pay. If you work in the shop, decide what a manager would cost and count it as an expense. Otherwise the shop looks profitable only because you're working for free. Goods taken for the house. The tin of milk and bag of rice that went home are sales the shop never got paid for. Record them at cost. Either count them as your drawings or pay for them. Losses. Breakage, expiry and shortage are real costs. If you don't list them, they hide inside a lower gross profit and you never see their size. Credit not yet paid. A credit sale counts as a sale, but the money isn't yours until it arrives. Keep a debtors book and watch the total. Why the cash doesn't match the profit At the end of that month, the owner might have much more than ₦120,000 in hand, or much less. Both are normal. Cash can be higher than profit because you sold down your stock without replacing it, or because a supplier gave you goods on credit. Cash can be lower than profit because you bought extra stock, because customers owe you, or because you took money out for school fees. That's why "there's money in the account" tells you so little. A shop can be profitable and short of cash, or losing money with a full drawer for a while. Only the calculation tells you which. What to do with the answer Compare month to month. One month means little. Three in a row show a direction. Watch the gross profit percentage. If it drops from 19% to 15% while sales stay level, either your costs went up and your prices didn't, or goods are leaving without being paid for. Check your pricing with markup vs margin, then your stock counts. Look at expenses as a share of sales. In the example they are about 13%. That means any product sold at less than a 13% margin makes this shop nothing. Decide what you can take out. Your drawings should come from net profit. Take more than that for long and you are eating the stock. What you need to do it Four records, kept through the month: A daily sales record book, for the sales figure. Your supplier invoices, for purchases. A list of expenses paid. A stock count at month end, valued at cost. The method is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. The count is the part people skip, and without it the profit figure is a guess. If a full count each month is too much, count and value your top 50 items exactly and estimate the rest, then do a complete count each quarter.

  • Markup vs margin: how to set a selling price

    Ask ten shop owners what profit they make on an item and most will say something like "I add 20%". Ask what share of their sales is profit and they'll say 20% again. Those two can't both be true, and the gap between them is real money. Two numbers that sound alike For example, say an item costs you ₦1,000 and you sell it for ₦1,250. Your profit is ₦250. Markup is that profit compared with what you paid. ₦250 ÷ ₦1,000 = 25%. Margin is the same profit compared with what the customer paid. ₦250 ÷ ₦1,250 = 20%. Same item, same ₦250. Markup is always the bigger number, because it is measured against the smaller amount. Why it matters: your rent, salaries and fuel are paid out of sales. If those costs eat 18% of everything you sell, and you "add 20%" to your goods, your margin is 16.7%. You are losing money on every sale while believing you make 20%. Start from what the item really cost you The supplier's price is not your cost. Your cost is what you had spent by the time the item was sitting on your shelf. Here's an example with made-up figures. You buy a carton of 12 bottles of body lotion for ₦30,000. Transport from the market is ₦1,200 and the loader takes ₦300. The carton has cost you ₦31,500, so each bottle is ₦31,500 ÷ 12 = ₦2,625. That's the landed cost. If one bottle in every carton usually arrives leaking, divide by 11 and the cost is ₦2,864. Price from the number of bottles you can actually sell. From cost to price Decide the margin you need, then use this: Selling price = cost ÷ (1 − margin) For a 20% margin on the lotion: ₦2,625 ÷ 0.80 = ₦3,281. Round up to ₦3,300. Check it. Profit is ₦3,300 − ₦2,625 = ₦675, and ₦675 ÷ ₦3,300 is 20.5%. Good. Now see what happens if you "add 20%" instead: ₦2,625 × 1.20 = ₦3,150. Profit is ₦525, and the margin is 16.7%. The difference is ₦150 a bottle. On 40 bottles a week, that's ₦6,000 a week, or about ₦312,000 over a year, from one product. What margin do you need? Enough to cover the costs of running the shop, with something left for you. Add up a normal month's running costs: rent (the yearly figure divided by 12), salaries, fuel and electricity, data and airtime, transport that isn't tied to a particular purchase, levies, and losses from damage and expiry. Divide by a normal month's sales. If the costs are ₦270,000 and sales are ₦1,800,000, that's 15%. In that shop, a product with a 15% margin earns the owner nothing. Everything above 15% is what you actually keep. You won't use one margin for everything Some goods have prices the whole street knows: a sachet of water, a loaf of bread, a recharge card, a popular brand of noodles. You can't price those much above the shop next door, so they'll carry thin margins. Their job is to bring people in. The margin comes from goods where the customer doesn't have a fixed price in mind: cosmetics, accessories, gift items, anything unusual. A shop's pricing skill is mostly knowing which is which. What matters is the blend. Work out your margin across the whole month, not item by item, and compare it with the running-cost figure above. When your supplier's price goes up Reprice the stock already on your shelf, not only the new delivery. The money from selling today's bottle has to buy tomorrow's, at tomorrow's price. A shop that sells old stock at the old price finds it can afford fewer cartons each time it restocks, even though sales looked healthy. Keep the landed cost on each item's page in your stock record book, and update it with every delivery. Then repricing takes minutes, and your daily sales book will show whether the new price is holding.

  • How to collect debts from customers without losing them

    Selling on credit puts a shop owner in an awkward spot. The people who owe you are your neighbours, your regulars, sometimes your relatives. Ask too hard and you lose a customer. Don't ask and you lose the money, then the customer anyway, because people avoid shops where they owe. Most of the work of collecting a debt is done before the debt exists. But if you're already owed, start here. Know exactly what you're owed You can't collect a figure you aren't sure of. "You're owing me small money" gets you small money, or nothing. Write down, for each person: what they took, on what dates, what they've paid, and the balance. If you don't have this yet, build it now from your sales book and set up a proper debtors book, one page per customer. Then sort the list by how long each debt has been outstanding. Recent debts are the easiest to recover. The longer a debt sits, the less it feels like a debt to the person who owes it. The steps, in order Don't jump straight to anger. Go up one step at a time, and give each a few days. 1. A friendly reminder. In person or by message, private, with the figure. "Good afternoon ma. Just a reminder that your balance with us is ₦14,200 from September. When can I expect it?" Always end with "when". It turns a reminder into a commitment. 2. Ask for a date, and write it down. If they say "next week", ask which day. Note the date on their page while they watch. 3. Follow up on that date. Not a week later. On the day. This is where most owners lose their nerve, and where most debts are won or lost. People pay the creditors who remember. 4. Stop further credit. Politely and without drama. "I can't add to the account until the old balance is cleared. Cash is fine for today." Many debts get paid at this step, because the customer still needs the shop. 5. Offer a payment plan. For example, someone who can't find ₦22,500 may manage ₦5,000 every Friday. Agree the amounts and dates, write them on the page, and both sign. Give a receipt for each instalment showing the balance left. Part of your money over five weeks is far better than all of it never. 6. Put it in writing. If the plan fails, send a short letter or message stating the amount, how it arose, and a final date. Keep a copy. Be factual. No insults and no threats. 7. Decide whether to go further. For a large debt, a lawyer's letter often works where yours didn't. Some states, Lagos among them, have small claims procedures meant for modest debts. Ask a lawyer what is available where you are and whether the amount justifies the cost. What to say, and what not to say Talk about the money and the date. Don't talk about the person's character. Say "the balance is ₦14,200 and we agreed the 15th." Don't say "you people are always like this." Ask in private. Calling out a debt in front of other customers shames the person, and shamed people stop coming rather than start paying. Keep it short. A long complaint gives them something to argue with. A figure and a date don't. What not to do Don't post debtors on social media or stick their names on the shop wall. It can expose you to a legal claim, and it tells every other customer how you treat people. Don't seize their property or go to their house to take things. Don't threaten. Not with the police, not with anything else. An unpaid shop debt is a civil matter between the two of you. Don't send people to harass them at home or at work. Any of these can turn you from the person who is owed into the person who is in trouble. When to let it go Some debts aren't coming back. The customer has moved, has nothing, or simply won't. Set yourself a point, say six months with no payment after you've been through every step, and write the debt off. Mark the page "written off" with the date, close the account, and stop spending energy on it. Then take the lesson, which is about who you gave credit to and how much. Preventing the next one Collection is the expensive end of credit. The cheap end is control. Choose who gets credit. A short list, picked by you. Staff can't extend it. Set a limit for each person, at a level you could afford to lose. Agree when it's due at the start: month end, or within two weeks. Record every item on the day, and show the customer the entry. Read the summary every month. Who is near their limit? Who has gone quiet? Remind early. A message two days before month end is friendlier and works better than a demand two months later. If you'd rather not give credit at all, that's a legitimate choice. Put up a sign, apply it to everyone, and don't make exceptions that the next customer can point to. For a shop that does give credit, the books that keep it under control are the debtors book and the daily sales record book. This article is general information, not legal advice.

  • How to get more customers on Jiji

    When Jiji adverts aren't bringing calls, the first instinct is to pay for promotion. Sometimes that's right. More often the advert itself is the problem, and paying only shows a weak advert to more people. Go through these first. They cost nothing. Get approved, and stay approved An advert nobody can see gets no customers. Jiji reviews every advert before it goes live, and its posting rules are specific about what it won't accept. As of 6 October 2026, these include: photos that aren't your own, such as screenshots or pictures from elsewhere photos with contact details, prices or logos written on them several different items in one photo titles with repeated words or contact details descriptions that aren't about the item prices outside the normal market range duplicates of an advert you have already posted The shortcut many sellers take, posting the supplier's catalogue image with a phone number written across it, breaks three of those at once. Photos do most of the selling On a phone screen your advert is a small picture and one line of text beside dozens of others. The picture decides whether anyone taps. Take the photo in daylight, near the shop door or a window. No flash. Use a plain background. A clean counter or a sheet of white cardboard works. Show the real item: front, back, any label with the model or size, the box, and any accessories. If it's used, photograph the scratches. Buyers who arrive and find surprises don't buy, and they've cost you an hour. One product per advert. A table covered in twenty phones tells the buyer nothing about the one they want. Write the title a buyer would type People search by what they want. Put those words in the title, in the order they'd think of them: brand, model, the key specification, and condition. "HP EliteBook 840 G5, Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, UK used" will be found by someone searching for any of those terms. "Neat laptop available" will be found by nobody. Don't shout. Capital letters, strings of exclamation marks and "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP" read as desperate, and repeated words are against the rules anyway. Answer the questions before they are asked A good description saves you twenty phone calls from people who were never going to buy. Include: exactly what it is and what's in the box condition, stated honestly warranty, and who gives it your shop's area and opening hours whether you deliver, to where, and who pays Put a real price "Call for price" loses the buyer who is comparing five adverts and won't call any of them. A price that's obviously too low attracts time-wasters and suspicion. Look at what similar items are listed for and price where you can honestly compete. If you're higher, say why in the description, for example a warranty, a walk-in shop or original parts. Reply fast On a marketplace, the seller who answers first usually gets the sale. A buyer messages three sellers and goes with whoever replies. Decide who in the shop answers Jiji calls and messages, and make sure that person has the price list and knows what is in stock. A reply of "let me ask my boss" two hours later is a lost sale. When someone calls, confirm the item is on the shelf before saying yes. If your quantities aren't reliable, fix that with a stock record book for the items you advertise. Keep your adverts true Nothing damages a seller faster than adverts for things they no longer have. The buyer travels, finds nothing, and tells people. At closing each day, check what was sold against what is live and close the adverts for anything that's finished. When the stock comes back, post it again. Update prices too. If your cost has gone up and the advert still shows last month's price, every caller starts the conversation feeling misled. Use your shop A physical address is the best thing you have over sellers who only meet at junctions. Say so in every advert. Buyers can come and inspect, pay at a counter, and leave with a receipt. When they do come, treat it as the start of something. A customer who found you on Jiji and had a good experience comes back directly next time, and that costs you nothing. Then measure, and only then pay Mark every Jiji customer in your daily sales record book for a month. You'll learn which products bring calls, which adverts are dead, and how many Jiji sales a normal month gives you. With that figure you can make a sensible decision about paid promotion, because you'll be able to tell whether it brought extra sales or just cost money. How to work that out is in Jiji premium packages explained. If you are new to the platform, begin with how to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop.

  • How to manage stock in a small shop in Nigeria

    Stock is where a shop's money lives. A provision store with ₦3 million of goods on the shelves and ₦40,000 in the drawer has nearly all its wealth in tins and cartons. Yet most owners count the ₦40,000 every night and the ₦3 million once a year. Stock control sounds like something for supermarkets with scanners. It isn't. At the size of a small shop it comes down to five habits, and all of them can run on a notebook. 1. Know what you sell Write a list of every product, with the unit you count it in, what it costs you and what you sell it for. It's dull work and it pays back immediately. Most owners doing it for the first time find items they forgot they had, items priced below what they now cost, and two or three products that take up a whole shelf and haven't sold since Easter. Be exact about what counts as one product. A 400g tin and a 900g tin of the same milk are two products. So are the red and the black of the same phone case, if customers ask for them by colour. 2. Write down everything that comes in and goes out Stock changes for only a few reasons: you received goods, you sold goods, or something else happened to them. Damage, expiry, a return to the supplier, an item taken for the house. Each of those gets written down on the day. Sales go in a daily sales record book. Everything, including each day's sales total per item, goes on that item's page in a stock record book, which keeps a running balance of what should be on the shelf. If you only do one thing from this guide, do this for your 30 most important items. 3. Count, and compare A record nobody checks drifts away from the truth. The count is what pulls it back. You don't need to close. Count a section a day, and count your most valuable items weekly on a day that changes. Compare each count with the book balance and write the difference down in naira. The full method, with a count sheet, is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. When the shelf and the book disagree, the cause is one of three things: a recording mistake, damage nobody reported, or theft. Regular counts are how you tell them apart. A random difference now and then is error. The same items short every week is a pattern, and this guide to staff theft covers what to do about it. 4. Reorder by numbers, not by feeling Running out of a fast seller sends your customer to a competitor. Buying too much of a slow one locks up money you need for the fast one. Both come from ordering by eye. For each important item, work out a reorder level. A reorder level is the balance at which you place the next order, based on how many you sell a day and how long your supplier takes. Write it at the top of the item's page. The arithmetic is in reorder level formula, with a worked naira example. 5. Deal with what isn't selling Every shop has goods that have sat for months. They look like stock. In practice they are cash you can't spend, and some of them are getting closer to an expiry date. Once a month, go through your stock pages and mark anything with no sale in 60 days. Then decide: move it, bundle it, discount it, return it or write it off. The options, and how to choose, are in slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell. For anything with an expiry date, put new stock behind old stock every time you fill a shelf, so the oldest sells first. Two things that sit alongside stock control Pricing. Your records give you the true cost of each item, which is the only sound basis for a price. Many shops believe they make 20% and make less. See markup vs margin. People. Records only work if the people handling goods and money keep them. Put initials on every entry, and make closing the day a fixed routine. If you want the shop to run without you in it, this is how. A weekly rhythm When the notebook stops being enough A notebook handles one shop, a few hundred products and two or three staff. It starts to strain when the product list grows past what one person can keep posted each evening, when you open a second branch, or when you sell in the shop and online from the same shelf. The signs are easy to spot: the stock pages are a week behind, the count takes so long it gets skipped, and you no longer trust the balances. That's the point where software earns its place, and it's what we are building Tabs for. It hasn't launched yet. Whenever you do move to a system, the five habits above are what make it work. A system given bad records only gets to the wrong answer faster.

  • How to run a boutique successfully

    A boutique has a problem a provision store doesn't. A tin of milk bought in March is still a tin of milk in September. A dress bought in March is, by September, last season's dress in the three sizes nobody wanted. In clothing, stock loses value just by sitting. Nearly everything about running a boutique well follows from that. Stock is counted by size and colour "We have twelve of that dress" tells you nothing. If all twelve are size 8 and your customers are mostly 12 to 16, you have a dress nobody can buy and a customer walking out. Every style has to be tracked by its variations. One style in four sizes and three colours is twelve separate things to count. That grid, with made-up numbers, says a lot. Black in medium and large is gone, so you've been losing sales. Green is hardly moving in any size. And extra-large is stuck in every colour, so you bought too many. Keep a page like this for each style in your stock record book, and update it from each day's sales. Buy narrow, then go deep on winners The costliest mistake in a boutique is buying a full size run of something untested. Bring in a new style in small numbers, weighted to the sizes that sell in your shop. Watch it for two weeks. If it moves, reorder quickly and in depth, in the sizes and colours that went first. If it doesn't, you've only a few pieces to clear. Know your own size curve. Go through three months of sales and count how many pieces you sold in each size. If 60% of what you sell is L and XL, 60% of what you buy should be too. Price knowing you'll mark some down Not everything will sell at full price. Some will go at 20% off, and some at cost. Your full price has to carry that. Here's an example with invented figures. You buy 20 pieces at ₦10,000 each, landed, so ₦200,000. You price them at ₦18,000. 12 sell at full price: ₦216,000 5 sell at 25% off, ₦13,500: ₦67,500 3 are cleared at ₦9,000: ₦27,000 Total taken: ₦310,500 on ₦200,000 of goods. Gross profit is ₦110,500, about 36% of sales, even though the ticket price suggested 44%. Had you priced at ₦14,000 "to sell fast", the same pattern would have left you with very little. Build the markdowns in from the start. The arithmetic of margin is in markup vs margin. Put an age limit on stock Give every piece a deadline. Write the arrival date on the tag or in your book. 30 days without selling: move it. Front rail, on the mannequin, in your status posts. 60 days: first markdown. 90 days: clear it at whatever it will fetch. It feels painful to sell something below cost. It's far worse to have ₦500,000 in old stock on the rails while you can't afford the new arrivals that would actually sell. The reasoning is in slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell. Display A boutique sells with the eyes. Dress the mannequin and change it weekly. Hang by colour or by outfit, not crammed by size. Leave space on the rails. Keep the pressing iron or steamer in use, because a creased garment looks cheap. Good lighting and a full-length mirror do more for sales than any amount of extra stock. A fitting room matters too, since people buy what they've tried on. Where a boutique loses stock Small, light and valuable is the worst combination for theft, and clothes are all three. The fitting room. Count pieces in and count them out. A simple numbered tag for how many items someone took in works. Staff purchases and "borrowing". Anything staff take is recorded and paid for like any sale. Nothing is worn out and returned. Tags. Every piece carries a tag with its reference and price. A piece with no tag gets sold at whatever someone decides. Returns and exchanges. Have a clear written policy on the receipt, such as exchange within seven days, unworn, with the receipt. Record every exchange in and out. Then count. A boutique's stock is small enough to count in full each month, style by style, against the size grids. The method is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. Selling beyond the door Most boutiques now sell as much through a phone as over the counter. Post new arrivals on your status the day they come in. Keep a WhatsApp catalogue of what's actually available, with sizes. See how to sell on WhatsApp Business when you also have a shop. The risk is selling the same last piece twice, once in the shop and once in a chat. Whoever answers messages has to check the rail before confirming, and take an item off the catalogue the moment it sells. The numbers to watch each month Sales, and gross profit after markdowns. Sales by size, to guide the next purchase. Which styles sold out in under two weeks. Those are your reorders. The cost value of stock over 60 days old. This should be falling. The stock count difference. A boutique that knows those five things buys better every month. One that doesn't keeps filling its rails with last season.

  • How to run a cosmetics shop: stock, expiry dates and shelves

    Cosmetics is a good trade for a small shop. The goods are compact, customers come back regularly, and the profit on each item is usually better than on provisions. It also has four traps: fakes, expiry dates, too many variations, and stock that's small enough to leave in a handbag. A cosmetics shop does well when it manages those four. Buy genuine, and be able to show it Your customers put these products on their skin. A fake cream that causes a reaction costs you more than the sale, because in a neighbourhood shop that news spreads. Buy from distributors and wholesalers you can trace, and keep every invoice. Cosmetics are regulated products in Nigeria. Check for the NAFDAC registration number on the pack, and be suspicious of popular brands offered far below the usual price. Look at each delivery properly: sealed packs, clear printing, a batch number and a date. Record what you received on a goods received note. When a customer asks "is this original?", being able to say who you bought it from is worth a great deal. Expiry dates Creams, lotions, make-up and perfumes all have a shelf life. Many also carry a small open-jar symbol with a number, which shows how many months the product is good for once opened. Read the date on every delivery before accepting it. A supplier clearing stock with three months left is passing their problem to you. Arrange by date, with the earliest in front. Once a month, walk the shelves and list anything within six months of its date. Then move it forward, bundle it, discount it, or ask the supplier about an exchange while there's still time. The same approach pharmacies use is set out in how to do stock-taking in a pharmacy. Take expired products off sale completely. Heat is your enemy Lipsticks melt, creams separate and perfumes change in heat and direct sun. A shop that bakes all afternoon is quietly ruining its stock. Keep products out of direct sunlight and away from windows. Don't store cartons against a hot wall or under a zinc roof without ventilation. If you can only cool one part of the shop, put the most heat-sensitive and most valuable items there. Shades and sizes multiply your stock One foundation in fifteen shades is fifteen products. One cream in three sizes is three. A cosmetics shop can easily carry a thousand separate lines in a small room. That's where money gets stuck. In most ranges, a handful of shades or sizes do nearly all the selling. Track by shade and size, not just by product. "We have foundation" is useless if the three shades your customers wear are finished. Find your sellers. Go through a month of your daily sales record book and count by shade. Stock deep in what sells and thin in the rest. You don't need every shade to be a good shop. Set a reorder level for your top lines so they never run out. Arrange the shop to sell and to be seen Group by use, for example skin care, hair care, make-up, fragrance, nails, men's products and baby products. Within each group, keep brands together in a neat block, sizes small to large. Eye level for the lines with the best profit and your reliable sellers. Small, expensive items in a glass case or behind the counter, such as perfumes, branded make-up, serums and hair extensions. Testers clearly marked, kept clean, one of each. Without testers, people open the sealed stock. Good light and a mirror. People buy make-up they can see on themselves. Nothing valuable beside the door. More on layout in how to arrange a provision store. The principles carry over. Where the stock goes missing Lipsticks, eye pencils, nail polish and small perfumes are among the easiest goods anywhere to pocket. The shop is often busy, with several customers handling products at once. What helps: Keep the till where you can see the room. Limit how many open items sit on the counter at once. Count the small, costly lines every week. It takes minutes when they're in one case. Record every tester, sample and damaged item, so they don't show up later as unexplained shortages. Staff buy at the counter like anyone else, with a receipt. If the same items keep coming up short, the steps in how to stop staff stealing from your shop show how to narrow it down fairly. Price with the whole picture Cosmetics usually carry a healthy margin, and it's needed. It has to cover testers, breakage, products that expire, shades that never sell, and the occasional return. Work from your landed cost, and know the difference between what you add to cost and what you keep from the sale. That's in markup vs margin. Display prices. Customers comparing three creams shouldn't have to ask three times, and visible prices stop anyone inventing their own. Know your customers Beauty buyers are loyal to products and to people who give good advice. Learn what your regulars use. Tell them when it's back in stock. A WhatsApp status showing new arrivals works well for this trade. See how to sell on WhatsApp Business when you also have a shop. Don't recommend what you can't stand behind, and never promise results a product can't deliver. A monthly routine Count the high-value case weekly, and the whole shop once a month. List everything within six months of expiry and act on it. Review sales by shade and size before placing the next order. Mark anything with no sale in 60 days and deal with it as slow-moving stock. Work out the month's profit after losses.

  • How to run a successful provision store

    A provision store can be full of customers from morning to night and still leave its owner with nothing at the end of the year. It's one of the commonest stories in Nigerian retail: the shop is always busy, the shelves are always stocked, and the owner still borrows to restock in January. The reason is built into the trade. Provisions are things people buy often, know the price of, and can get from three other shops on the same street. That means thin profit on each item. A store like this doesn't succeed by selling. It succeeds by not leaking. Here are the places it leaks, and what to do about each. Know your twenty In almost every provision store, a small number of products bring in most of the money: a few brands of noodles, milk, sugar, beverages, soft drinks, detergent, bread, water. Find yours. Go through a month of your sales book and add up sales per item. The top twenty or thirty are your business. Everything else is there to make the shop feel complete. Those top items get special treatment. They never run out. You know their exact cost today, not last month. You count them every week. If a customer walks in for noodles and milk and you have neither, they don't come back for the sardines. Buy by what sold, not by what looks empty Most small stores restock by walking the shelves and buying whatever looks low, plus whatever the distributor's rep is pushing this week. Buy from your records instead. For example, if you sold 40 cartons of a brand last month, you need roughly ten a week. For your top items, set a level at which you reorder, so the next delivery lands before the shelf empties. The sum is simple, and it's worked through in reorder level formula, with a worked naira example. Be careful with "buy ten, get one free". It is a good deal only if you can sell all eleven before they expire and without starving your fast sellers of cash. Money tied up in a slow carton is money that isn't buying the carton that would have sold twice this week. Price from your real cost Prices move constantly, and a store that keeps selling at last month's price is giving its restocking money away. Every time a delivery arrives at a new cost, reprice what is already on the shelf too. Include transport and loading in the cost. And know the difference between adding 15% to cost and making 15% on the sale, because they aren't the same. That's explained in markup vs margin. Put prices on the shelves. It saves your attendant from guessing and saves your customers from being charged whatever someone feels like. Credit will sink you quietly "Book it down for me" is how a provision store turns into a lending business that charges no interest and keeps no accounts. You can't refuse everyone, because some of your best customers are salaried people who pay on the 28th. So make it a system: A short list of people who can take goods on credit, chosen by you. A limit for each. A debtors' book with one page per person, where every item taken and every payment is written with the date. No new credit for anyone who hasn't cleared last month. Staff can't add names to the list. Add up the debtors' book at the end of each month. Many owners are shocked by the total the first time. Watch the dates Provisions expire, and a tin you paid for and then threw away has cost you the profit on several you sold. Whenever you fill a shelf, bring the old stock forward and put the new stock behind. Once a month, check the slowest shelves for anything within three months of its date and move it: put it by the counter, bundle it, cut the price a little. A small profit now beats a full loss later. More on that in slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell. Never sell expired goods. Beyond the legal and health risk, a neighbourhood shop lives on trust, and one bad tin of milk travels fast. Small things that add up Small items such as sachets, sweets, biscuits, seasoning cubes and single sticks of anything are where shrinkage hides. Nobody steals a carton of sugar. Plenty of people, including children of the house and your own staff, take a biscuit. You don't need to be harsh about it. You need to be able to see it. If something is taken for the house, write it down like a sale at cost. Count a few of these small lines each week. When the people around the shop know the count happens, most of the loss stops. The records that matter A provision store doesn't need an accountant. It needs four things kept every day: A sales book, closed each evening against the cash, the transfers and the POS. A stock record book for your top items, with a running balance. The debtors' book. A note of every naira that leaves the till for something other than change. With those, you can answer the questions that decide whether the shop grows: what did I sell, what did it cost me, who owes me, and where did the rest go. Without them, busy and broke can go on for years. Then, and only then, grow When the records agree with the shelf and the drawer for three months running, you'll know your real monthly profit. That's the figure that tells you whether to add a fridge, take the shop next door, or open a second branch. If you get to that last one, how to manage two shops is the next thing to read.

  • How to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop

    Putting your goods on Jiji is not the hard part. The posting form takes a few minutes. The hard part comes later, when someone calls from across town about the blue one, drives over, and finds you sold it yesterday. This guide covers both: getting adverts live, and running Jiji alongside a physical shop without disappointing people. The posting steps and rules below are taken from Jiji's own help page as it stood on 6 October 2026. Jiji changes its screens from time to time, so treat its page as the final word. Posting an advert Sign in to your Jiji profile, or register if you don't have one. Tap Sell. Choose the category that fits the item. Upload your photos. Write a clear title and a detailed description. Enter your price. Check everything, then tap Post Ad. The advert doesn't appear straight away. Jiji reviews it against its rules first and emails you when it is approved. If something is wrong, the email says what to change. What gets an advert rejected Most rejections come from the photos. Jiji says photos must be good quality, must be your own, and must show the actual item in the right category. They must not include: contact details or prices written on the image logos, including Jiji's screenshots or pictures taken from elsewhere several different items in one picture The title can't contain repeated words or contact details. The description has to be about the item. The price should be within the normal market range, and you can't post the same advert twice. For a shop owner the practical lesson is this: photograph your own stock, on your own counter, one item per picture. Catalogue images from the supplier's WhatsApp are exactly what gets refused. Writing an advert that gets calls Put what a buyer would type into the title: brand, model, size or capacity, and condition. "Samsung A15 128GB, new, sealed" will be found. "Clean phone for sale" won't. In the description, answer the questions you get asked every day in the shop. Is it new or used? What comes in the box? Is there a warranty, and from whom? Where is your shop, and what hours are you open? Give a real price. Adverts priced at ₦1 or "call for price" waste the buyer's time and yours, and Jiji's rules expect a market-range figure anyway. Running Jiji next to a physical shop Only advertise what you can hand over today. If you have two of something, both can go quickly, so check the shelf before you say "yes, it's available" on the phone. The surest way to keep this straight is a stock record you trust. If yours has drifted, start with a stock record book for the items you advertise. Take adverts down when stock runs out. Make it one person's job, at closing, to compare the day's sales with what is live on Jiji and close anything that's gone. Ten minutes a day prevents most wasted journeys. Keep one price. For example, if the advert says ₦85,000 and your attendant quotes ₦90,000 at the counter, the buyer assumes they're being cheated. Whoever answers the Jiji calls needs the same price list as the shop floor. Invite buyers to the shop. A physical address is your advantage over sellers who only meet at bus stops. Buyers can inspect the item, and you can issue a proper receipt. Record Jiji sales like any other sale. They go in the same daily sales book, with a note that the customer came from Jiji. After a month you'll know how much of your turnover the adverts bring in, which is what tells you whether paying to promote them is worth it. Paying for more visibility Posting does not require buying anything. Jiji sells Premium Services, called TOP and Boost packages, for sellers who want their adverts shown more prominently. Whether that's worth it depends on your margins, and it's a decision better made with a month of your own sales figures in hand. We've covered it separately in Jiji premium packages explained, and there are free things to fix first in how to get more customers on Jiji.

  • How to sell on WhatsApp Business when you also have a shop

    Your customers are already on WhatsApp. Many of them already message you there: "Do you have the big size?" "How much is it now?" "Keep one for me." Selling on WhatsApp isn't something new to learn. It's a matter of doing properly what's already happening by accident. For a shop, that mostly means two things: making it easy for people to see what you have, and making sure a sale made on the phone is recorded like any other. Use the Business app, on a shop number WhatsApp Business is a separate free app made for traders. Put it on a phone number that belongs to the shop, not your personal line. That matters more than it seems. If the shop's customers are all in your attendant's personal WhatsApp, they leave when the attendant leaves. A shop number stays with the shop. Fill in the business profile: shop name, what you sell, address, opening hours. It answers the questions people would otherwise send you. The tools worth using The catalogue is a page inside your profile showing your products with photos, prices and descriptions. Customers can browse it and send you a message about a specific item. This is the most useful feature for a shop. Status means photos or short videos that disappear after a day, seen by people who have saved your number. Good for new arrivals and restocks. Quick replies are saved answers to questions you get constantly: your address, your account details, your delivery charges. You type a short code and the full answer appears. Labels are coloured tags for chats, such as "New order", "Awaiting payment", "Paid", "Delivered". With ten orders open at once, labels are what stop one being forgotten. Greeting and away messages. An automatic reply for first-time messages and for when you're closed, so people know when to expect an answer. Broadcast lists. One message sent to many customers at once, each receiving it privately. It only reaches people who have saved your number, which is a useful limit: it keeps you from spamming strangers. Setting up the catalogue Photograph your own goods, in daylight, on a plain background. One product per entry, with the size, colour or variant in the name. Put the real price. "DM for price" loses people. Start with your 20 to 30 best items, not everything. Remove or hide what's out of stock. Nothing irritates a customer like ordering from a catalogue and being told it finished last week. That last point is the whole discipline of selling online from a physical shelf. Your catalogue is a promise about what's in the shop. It's only as true as your stock record, so if yours is shaky, start with a stock record book for the items you list. From message to money Agree one way of handling an order and have everyone follow it. Confirm the item is on the shelf before saying yes. Check, don't assume. State the total, including delivery if any. Send the shop's account details. Only the shop's account. Never a personal one. Confirm the money on your own bank app. A screenshot isn't payment. The routine is in fake transfer alerts: how to confirm a payment before goods leave the shop. Set the item aside with the customer's name on it the moment it's paid for. Record the sale in the daily sales record book, marked as a WhatsApp order. It comes off the shelf count like any other sale. Send a receipt, as a photo of the written one or a typed message with the items, amount and date. Hand over or dispatch, and update the label. Step 6 is the one that gets skipped. WhatsApp sales that never reach the sales book are a common reason the cash, the bank and the shelf don't agree at the end of the day. Delivery Decide your terms once and save them as a quick reply: which areas you deliver to, and what it costs who pays the rider, and when that goods are paid for before they leave what happens if the customer isn't there Use riders you know. Write down who took what, to where, and when. Have the customer confirm receipt in the chat. Posting without being a nuisance Post to status when there's something to say: new stock, a restock of something that ran out, a real price drop. Two or three useful posts a week beat ten a day. Use broadcasts sparingly. Once or twice a month, with something worth opening. Never add customers to groups they didn't ask to join. Reply quickly during opening hours. On WhatsApp the customer is often asking two other shops the same question, and the first helpful answer wins. Is it worth it? Mark WhatsApp orders in your sales book for a month, the same way you would for Jiji. At the end, add them up. You'll know how much of your turnover comes through the phone, which products sell there, and whether it deserves more of your time. If you also list on a marketplace, compare the two. More on that in how to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop.

  • How to start a wholesale provision business

    A provision retailer and a provision wholesaler handle the same cartons and run very different businesses. The retailer opens the carton and sells the tins one by one at a good margin. The wholesaler sells the carton whole, earns a small amount on it, and has to sell a great many. If you're moving from retail into wholesale, or starting there, the habits that matter change. Display and customer service matter less. Buying, storage, credit and counting matter much more. How the money works In wholesale you earn a little on each carton and rely on volume. Here's an example with invented figures. You buy a carton for ₦28,000 and sell it for ₦29,000. That's ₦1,000, or about 3.4% of the selling price. Sell 40 cartons a day at that margin and you make ₦40,000 a day before expenses. Sell 8 and you make ₦8,000, which may not cover the rent and the loader. Two things follow. A small mistake on price is a large share of your profit: selling at ₦28,700 because a customer argued costs you 30% of what you'd have made. And a single lost or damaged carton wipes out the profit on 28 others. Wholesale rewards people who are exact. Where to buy Your buying price is your business. Sources, roughly from best price to easiest access: Manufacturers and their distributors. Best prices, but they expect volume and often payment up front. See how to become a distributor in Nigeria. Large wholesalers in the main markets. The usual starting point. Build a relationship with two or three, so you aren't stranded when one is out of stock. Importers, for imported lines. Buy what moves in your area, not what's cheapest in the market. Ask the retailers you hope to supply what they sell most and what they struggle to find. Check every delivery before signing for it: quantity, brand, size, condition and dates. Record it on a goods received note. At wholesale volumes, one short carton per delivery adds up to real money over a year. Price by the carton, and know your floor Set a price list and keep it written down. Work from landed cost: the supplier's price plus transport, loading and offloading, spread across the cartons. That's your true cost per carton. Many wholesalers use tiers: one price for a single carton, a slightly lower one for five or more, lower again for a regular who takes a large quantity. Decide the tiers in advance. Don't invent them at the counter. For each product, know the lowest price at which you still make something after your running costs. Below that you're working for nothing. The difference between adding a percentage to cost and keeping a percentage of the sale is explained in markup vs margin. When your supplier's price rises, reprice the stock you already hold. You'll need the higher amount to replace it. Storage Your store is your shop. Lay it out for speed and for counting. One place for each product, with a label on the rack. Cartons off the floor on pallets, away from damp walls. Don't stack higher than the cartons can bear. Crushed stock at the bottom is your loss. Oldest stock at the front and on top, so it goes out first. Write the arrival date on cartons. See first in, first out. Clear walkways, so a count doesn't require moving half the store. Proper locks, and a known list of who holds keys. Regular checks for rats and leaks. Credit is the main danger Retailers will ask to take goods and pay after selling. Some of your best customers will work this way. So will the ones who ruin you. You decide who gets credit, after they've bought for cash for a while. Every customer has a limit and a due date. Seven or fourteen days is common. No new goods while the last lot is unpaid past its date. Every credit sale gets an invoice the customer signs, and a line on their page in the debtors book. Add up what you're owed every week. In wholesale, the total owed can quickly exceed the value of the stock in your store. Chase on the due date, not a month later. See how to collect debts from customers. Remember that you probably paid your own supplier in cash. Every naira out on credit is a naira you can't restock with. The records Wholesale needs tighter paperwork than retail, because each item is worth more and there are fewer, larger transactions. Samples of the store-room cards are in stock card and bin card. Separate the jobs if you can. The person who releases goods from the store shouldn't be the one who writes the invoice and collects the money. Count the store on a cycle: fast lines weekly, everything monthly. Compare with the bin cards and value the difference at cost. Starting small You don't need a warehouse on day one. Begin with a handful of the fastest-moving lines in your area, in a secure store you can afford. Supply a few retailers you know. Sell for cash at first. As you learn what moves and who pays, add lines and extend credit carefully. Reinvest rather than draw out. In a business with margins this thin, growth comes from turning the same money over more times, and from not losing it to shortages and bad debts. Work out your real profit each month using how to calculate profit and loss for a shop. In wholesale the gap between feeling busy and being profitable is wider than anywhere else in the trade.

  • How to take stock in a shop without closing for the day

    The reason most shops take stock once a year, if at all, is that it means locking the door for a day. A day closed is a day's sales gone, so the count keeps getting moved to next month. You don't have to close. Count the shop in pieces, one section at a time, while it stays open. A provision store split into six sections is fully counted in a week at about half an hour a day. Before you count Divide the shop into sections that one person can count in 30 to 40 minutes. Go by where things physically sit, not by category. For example: left wall top shelves, left wall bottom shelves, the counter display, the fridge, the store room. Give each section a name and write the list down. The same sections get used every time. Then rule your count sheet. One sheet per section. Fill in the Item and Unit columns before you start, in the order the goods sit on the shelf. Leave the Book balance column empty for now. That's deliberate, and it matters. The count Pick a quiet time. For most shops that's the first hour after opening or the slow stretch in mid-afternoon. Tidy the section first. Pull forward anything pushed to the back, and bring out cartons of the same item from under the shelf so they are counted together. Count from one end to the other, top shelf to bottom. Write each figure down the moment you have it. Count in the unit on the sheet. If the sheet says tins, open cartons get counted as tins. A sealed carton of 24 is 24. Put a small sticker or chalk mark on each shelf as you finish it, so nothing is counted twice or skipped. Only when the section is done, copy in the book balance for each item and work out the difference. The person counting should not know the book balance in advance. Someone who knows the book says 48 tends to find 48. That's the reason the column stays empty until the end, and the reason the best counter is someone who doesn't sell from that section. Sales made while you are counting This is what puts people off counting during opening hours, and it has a simple answer. Keep a scrap of paper in the section. If a customer buys something from a shelf you have already counted, write it down: item and quantity. If they buy from a shelf you haven't reached, do nothing, because the count will pick it up. At the end, subtract the noted sales from your counted figures before you compare with the book. Three tins sold from a counted shelf means the shelf figure you compare is three lower. Reading the result Here is part of a sheet from an imaginary provision store. Small differences in both directions are usually recording mistakes. One over on sardines probably means a sale was written against the wrong item. Six cans short is different. Before deciding what it means, check three things. Was the last delivery really the quantity on the invoice? Is there a carton in the store room that wasn't counted? Were any given out on credit and not written down? If all three come back clean, you have a real shortage, and it is worth reading about how stock and money leave a shop. Put a value on it either way. Six cans at a cost of ₦700 is ₦4,200. Shortages feel different once they are in naira. After the count Correct the book to match the shelf. In your stock record book, write a line that says "Counted on shelf" with the date and the real figure, so the book starts the next week telling the truth. Don't quietly change the old balance. The correction is part of the record. Keep the count sheets in a file. After three months they show you things a single count can't: which items are short again and again, and which section they sit in. How often There isn't one right answer, but this works for most small shops. Count your 20 most valuable or fastest items every week, on a day that changes. Count the whole shop, section by section, once a month. Do one full count on a single day at the end of the year, when you want a clean figure for your accounts. A weekly count of 20 items takes 15 minutes. It's the cheapest protection a shop has.

  • How to write a receipt for a sale, with a sample

    A receipt is the smallest record in a shop and one of the most useful. It's the customer's proof that they paid. It's your proof of what you sold, to whom, and for how much. And when every sale gets one, from a numbered booklet, it becomes a control that makes it much harder for a sale to vanish. Writing a good one takes under a minute. What goes on a receipt Your business name, address and phone number. Have these printed on the booklet, or use a stamp. A receipt number. Printed, running in order. The date. The customer's name, where it matters. For small everyday sales you can leave it out. For anything costly, write it. What was sold. Each item on its own line, described well enough to identify it later. Quantity, price for one, and amount for each line. The total, in figures. For large amounts, write it in words as well. How it was paid: cash, transfer or POS. Who served the customer, with a signature. A sample Here's an example. The details below are invented. Use a duplicate booklet Buy a receipt booklet with numbered pages in pairs and a carbon sheet, or carbonless paper. The top copy goes to the customer and the copy stays in the book. That copy is the point. At the end of the day, the receipts issued should add up to the sales in your daily sales record book. The numbers should run in order with none missing. If a page is spoiled, write "cancelled" across both copies and leave them in the book. A torn-out page is a question that can't be answered. Details that save arguments Describe the item properly. "1 phone" is no help when the customer returns in three weeks with a different phone and your receipt. For electronics, write the brand, model and serial or IMEI number. Transfers. Confirm the alert on the shop's own phone or bank app before the goods leave. A screenshot on the customer's phone is not confirmation. Then write "Transfer" on the receipt and note the sender's name as it appears on the alert. Part payments. Write the full price, the amount paid today and the balance outstanding, all three. Issue a new receipt for each later payment, referring to the first receipt's number. Never write "paid" on a receipt until the full amount is in. Credit sales. If the customer hasn't paid anything, what you give them isn't a receipt. It's an invoice, and the debt goes in your debtors' book. The receipt comes when the money does. Returns and warranty. If your policy is no refund, or exchange within seven days, have it printed on the receipt. If an item has a warranty, write the period on it. The moment of sale is the time to agree these things, not the day something goes wrong. Corrections. Don't write over a figure. Rule a single line through the mistake, write the right figure beside it and sign. If the total is wrong, cancel the receipt and write a new one. Receipt or invoice? They get mixed up because they look alike. An invoice is a request for payment. It says: here is what you bought and what you owe. You issue it before, or without, being paid. A receipt is an acknowledgement of payment. It says: you have paid this, on this date. A walk-in customer who pays at the counter only needs a receipt. A customer you supply on account, such as an office, a school or a hotel, gets an invoice with each delivery and a receipt each time they pay. If you're registered for VAT, your documents have additional requirements. Ask your accountant what yours must show. Do it for every sale The receipts that get skipped are the small ones and the busy ones, which is exactly where money slips. Make it a rule with no exceptions, and put a sign by the counter: "Please ask for your receipt." That sign turns each customer into someone checking your shop for you, at no cost. It's one of the simplest protections there is, and there are more in how to stop staff stealing from your shop.

  • Is a phone accessories business profitable in Nigeria?

    The usual answer online is yes, very, followed by a claim that you can double your money on every charger. The markup on individual accessories can be high. That's true, and it's also why so many people open these shops and why so many close within a year. Profit on an item and profit in a business are different things. Here is what sits between them. Why it looks so good Accessories are cheap to buy in bulk and sold one at a time to people who need them today. Someone whose charger has just died isn't going to compare five shops. Compared with selling phones themselves, where the profit on each sale is a thin slice of a big price, accessories give you a much bigger slice of a small price. They also don't expire, take up little space, and don't need a fridge or a generator. All of that is real. What eats the profit Dead stock. This is the big one. Cases and screen protectors are made for specific models, and models change every year. A hundred cases for a phone people have stopped buying are worth close to nothing. Every accessories seller has a carton of them. Fakes and returns. Low-grade chargers and cables fail quickly. Either you replace them and lose the item, or you refuse and lose the customer. Selling better quality costs more upfront and saves this. Slow rent, fast fashion. Your rent is the same whether the month was good or bad. Many small items need to be sold before a shop covers its costs. Small things go missing. Earbuds and memory cards fit in a pocket. In a shop with open displays and more than one attendant, the count rarely matches unless somebody is checking. Price pressure. If you are in a phone market, the next shop sells the same cable. If you're in a neighbourhood, there are fewer customers. Work it out for your own shop Here's an example of the sum, with invented figures for a small shop. Change every number to your own. That ₦145,000 isn't yet profit. Two things still have to come out of it. The first is your own pay. If you work in the shop full time, your time has a price. The second is stock that won't sell. For example, suppose you bought ₦80,000 of cases this quarter that are now for an old model and will go for ₦20,000 if you're lucky. That is ₦60,000 lost, or ₦20,000 a month. The example shop is really making about ₦125,000 before the owner is paid. Notice what the gross profit is here: ₦270,000 on ₦900,000 of sales, which is 30%. The owner of this shop may well be adding 40 to 50% to most items and telling people so. Both things are true. The difference between what you add to cost and what you keep from sales is explained in markup vs margin. What the profitable ones do differently They buy narrow and reorder often. A little of each item, restocked weekly, beats a deep pile bought once. It keeps cash moving and limits what can go dead. They know what sells. Chargers, cables, power banks, earphones and protectors for the most common phones are needed every day by everyone. Unusual gadgets look good on the shelf and sit there. They track models. Before buying cases or protectors, they check which phones are actually selling around them now, not last year. They clear slow stock early. A case that hasn't sold in 60 days gets discounted or bundled with a protector while the model is still in use. See slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell. They count. A weekly count of the small, costly items against a stock record book takes fifteen minutes in a shop this size. They add services. Fitting a screen protector, setting up a new phone or doing a small repair earns money without any stock at all. Before you put money in Spend a week finding out three things. What is the rent, for how long upfront, for the spot you want? What do the nearest sellers charge for the ten commonest items, and what would those items cost you landed? And how many people pass that spot in a day who might need a charger? Put those into the table above. If the bottom line still looks worth your time after you've paid yourself and allowed for some dead stock, it's a real business. If it only works when every item sells at full price, it isn't yet. Then start small, write down every sale from the first day in a daily sales record book, and let a month of your own figures tell you what to buy next.

  • Jiji premium packages explained: TOP, Boost and whether they pay

    Sooner or later every seller on Jiji asks the same question: my adverts are live, the calls are slow, should I pay to promote them? This article explains how Jiji's paid options are organised and gives you a way to answer that question with your own numbers. One thing first. We haven't listed prices here. Jiji shows them inside its app and website by category, they change, and we couldn't confirm a current price list we would stand behind. A figure copied from an old blog post is worse than no figure. Below is where to find the real one. What Jiji sells According to Jiji's help page on Premium Services, checked on 6 October 2026, there are two kinds of paid promotion: TOP and Boost Packages. Which Boost Packages you are offered depends on what you sell. Jiji groups sellers into five category groups: Cars, for vehicle sellers Property, for real estate Others, for goods outside cars and property Others Lite, for fashion, services, beauty, food and similar All-in-one, for larger businesses promoting across every category Most shops will fall under Others or Others Lite. How to see the current price Open Jiji's Premium Services page. The help page above links to it. Choose the category group that fits what you sell. Look through the packages offered and the durations available. Pick a package and a duration, and tap Buy when you are ready. The price is shown before you pay. Jiji also says that if you aren't sure which to choose, you can ask for a call from a Jiji manager using Request help in your profile. Take that call if you're spending real money, and ask exactly what the package changes about where your adverts appear. Working out whether it pays A promotion is worth buying when the extra profit it brings is more than its price. Not extra sales. Extra profit. You need three numbers. Your profit per sale. What you keep on a typical Jiji sale after the cost of the item. If you sell a blender for ₦42,000 that cost you ₦35,000 landed, that's ₦7,000. The price of the package. From the screen above. Your normal Jiji sales. How many sales a week you get from Jiji without paying. If you don't know, you aren't ready to test anything yet. Mark Jiji customers in your daily sales book for a month first. Then divide the package price by your profit per sale. That is your break-even. Here's an example with invented figures: a package costs ₦14,000 for the month, and you keep ₦7,000 a sale. ₦14,000 ÷ ₦7,000 = 2. The promotion has to bring two extra sales in the month to pay for itself. If you normally get five Jiji sales a month and you get eight while promoted, it earned its keep. If you get five, it didn't. Now change the product. If you sell phone cases, for example, and keep ₦800 a sale, the same package needs 18 extra sales to break even. Paid promotion suits goods with a decent profit on each sale. It rarely suits low-priced items. Running a fair test Buy the shortest duration first. Promote the same adverts you were already running, so the promotion is the only thing that changed. Count Jiji sales for those weeks and compare with your normal figure. Avoid testing in a week that would have been unusual anyway. December proves nothing about February. Have the stock before you promote. Paying for attention and then telling callers "it has finished" is the most expensive way to run out. If you are unsure of your quantities, sort that first with a stock record book. Before you pay for anything Promotion puts more people in front of an advert. It doesn't make a weak advert convincing. If your photos are dark, your title is vague or your price is missing, more views will mostly mean more people scrolling past. The free fixes come first, and they're in how to get more customers on Jiji. If you are still setting up, start with how to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop.

  • Jiji or Jumia: which is better for a shop owner?

    People ask which is better as though they were two versions of the same thing. They aren't. They work in opposite ways, and which suits you depends on what you sell and how much of the selling you want to do yourself. The descriptions below are drawn from each company's own seller pages as they stood on 6 October 2026: Jiji's help pages and Jumia's VendorHub FAQ. Both change their terms, so confirm on their sites before you commit. How Jiji works Jiji is a classifieds site. You post an advert, a buyer sees it and contacts you, and the two of you do the deal directly. You post adverts yourself, and Jiji reviews each one before it goes live. Buyers reach you by call or chat. You agree the price with the buyer, and you can negotiate. You collect the payment. You hand over the goods or arrange delivery. Posting doesn't require buying anything. Jiji sells Premium Services, called TOP and Boost packages, for more visibility. In short, Jiji finds you the customer. Everything after that is yours. How Jumia works Jumia is a marketplace. The customer orders and pays on Jumia, and Jumia stands between you and the buyer. According to its VendorHub FAQ: You register as a seller with KYC documents: a national ID for individuals, or CAC registration documents for companies, plus bank account details. Jumia charges a commission, a percentage taken from the sale price, which varies by product category. You're paid by Jumia, typically on a weekly payout, with statements in the Vendor Center. For delivery, you either use Jumia Express, where Jumia stores your items and handles packing and delivery, or you keep the stock and drop packages at a Jumia drop-off station. Returns come back through the drop-off station for you to inspect and collect. In short, Jumia handles the order, the payment and the delivery, and takes a share for it. We haven't quoted commission rates. They differ by category and change, so read the current table on VendorHub for what you sell. Side by side Which goods suit which Jiji tends to suit: Higher-value items people want to see before paying: phones, laptops, generators, furniture, appliances. Used and fairly used goods. Items where buyers expect to negotiate. Bulky things that are awkward to courier. Sellers with a physical shop, because buyers can walk in. Jumia tends to suit: New, standard, packaged goods that are the same every time. Items that are easy to describe exactly and easy to ship. Sellers who can hold steady stock of the same lines. Sellers who'd rather not handle calls, haggling and riders. What each demands of your shop This is the part most comparisons skip. On Jiji, the risk is wasted time. An advert for something you sold yesterday costs you a phone call and an annoyed buyer. You need to take adverts down as stock runs out. It's manageable with a daily check. On Jumia, the risk is an order you can't fill. The customer has already paid Jumia. If the item isn't on your shelf because it sold over the counter an hour ago, you have a cancelled order against your seller record. Listing on a marketplace from the same shelf you sell from in person needs stock figures you can trust. On Jumia, your price has to carry the commission. Work out your margin after the commission and any delivery contribution, not before. An item that earns you 15% in the shop may earn very little once a category commission comes off. The arithmetic is in markup vs margin. On Jumia, your money arrives later. Weekly payouts mean you've parted with the goods before you're paid. A small shop needs enough cash to restock in between. Either way, record marketplace sales in your daily sales record book with the source marked, and keep a stock record for everything you list. So which one? If you run a shop selling goods such as phones, electronics, furniture or anything customers like to inspect, start with Jiji. It costs nothing to begin and it sends people to your door. See how to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop. If you sell new, standard goods, can keep them reliably in stock, and your margins leave room for commission, Jumia can add sales you'd never get from passers-by. Many sellers use both, for different products. If you do, don't list the same last unit in two places. Keep one stock count, decide how many units each channel may sell, and update both when something goes. Whichever you choose, run it for a month and measure. Count the sales, take off the fees, and see what you actually kept.

  • Opening stock and closing stock: what they mean and how to work them out

    These two terms come up the moment you try to work out your profit, and they are simpler than the textbooks make them sound. Opening stock is the value of the goods you had at the start of a period. Closing stock is the value of the goods you had at the end of it. The period can be a week, a month or a year. And one becomes the other: this month's closing stock is next month's opening stock. The goods on your shelf at midnight on 31 October are the same goods there on the morning of 1 November. Why a shop owner should care Because without them you can't know your profit. For example, suppose you sold ₦1,800,000 this month and bought ₦1,500,000 of goods. It's tempting to say you made ₦300,000 before expenses. That's only true if your shelves hold exactly the same value of goods as they did a month ago. If you ended the month with more stock than you started, some of that ₦1.5 million is still sitting on the shelf. You made more than ₦300,000. If you ended with less, you sold goods you had paid for earlier, and you made less. Opening and closing stock are what correct for that. The formula Cost of goods sold = opening stock + purchases − closing stock Cost of goods sold is what the things you sold cost you. Take it away from your sales and you have your gross profit. The same formula, turned around, gives you what your closing stock should be if you know what you sold: Expected closing stock = opening stock + purchases − cost of goods sold A worked example Here's an example. The figures are invented. A provision store counts its stock on 30 September and values it at ₦2,400,000. That's the opening stock for October. During October it buys ₦1,500,000 of goods. On 31 October it counts again. The stock is worth ₦2,450,000. That's the closing stock. Cost of goods sold = 2,400,000 + 1,500,000 − 2,450,000 = ₦1,450,000 October's sales were ₦1,800,000, so gross profit = 1,800,000 − 1,450,000 = ₦350,000. Notice the shop ended the month with ₦50,000 more stock than it began with. If the owner had simply taken sales minus purchases, they would have got ₦300,000 and understated their profit by ₦50,000. The rest of that calculation, down to net profit, is in how to calculate profit and loss for a shop. How to get the closing stock figure There are two ways, and the difference between them is useful. Count it. At the end of the period, count everything, multiply each quantity by its cost, and add up. This is the real figure. The method is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. Read it from your records. If you keep a stock record book, the balances on the pages, times cost, give you what the stock should be. The counted figure is what's actually there. The record figure is what ought to be there. The gap between them is your shrinkage: goods lost to damage, expiry, error or theft. A shop that only ever looks at one of the two never sees that number. Value at cost, not selling price This is the most common mistake. Stock is valued at what you paid for it, including the cost of getting it to your shop, not at what you hope to sell it for. If you count 40 tins that cost ₦2,800 each and sell for ₦3,300, the closing stock is 40 × 2,800 = ₦112,000. Use ₦3,300 and you'd be counting profit you haven't earned yet. If your cost has changed during the month, you have some tins bought at the old price and some at the new. The usual approach for a shop is to assume the oldest were sold first, so what's left is valued at the most recent costs. That's explained in first in, first out: how FIFO works in a provision store. Goods that are damaged, expired or unsellable shouldn't be in closing stock at full cost. Value them at what you can really get for them, which may be nothing. Mistakes to avoid Using purchases as cost of sales. They are only equal if stock didn't change. Valuing at selling price. It inflates your stock and your profit. Counting on a different day. If you count on the 3rd, the figure includes three days of the new month's trading. Count on the last day, or adjust for sales and deliveries since. Leaving out the store room. Stock under the counter, in the back and in your car boot all counts. Including goods that aren't yours. Items a supplier left on sale-or-return aren't your stock until you've sold them. Forgetting goods you've paid for that haven't arrived. Leave them out of the count, and make sure the purchase isn't in the month's figures either. The routine On the last day of each month, count and value your stock at cost. Write the figure down with the date. That single number closes one month and opens the next. After three months you'll have something most small shops never get: a profit figure you can trust, and a clear view of whether your stock is growing, shrinking or simply sitting. If it's sitting, see slow-moving stock.

  • Petty cash book format for a small shop

    Every shop spends small amounts all day. The loader wants ₦1,500. The generator needs fuel. Someone has to buy nylon bags, pay the refuse collector, get water. In most shops that money comes straight out of the sales drawer, and nobody writes it down. By evening the cash is ₦11,000 short of the sales total, and no one can say whether it was spent, lost or taken. A petty cash book solves this with a separate small pot of money and one line per expense. How it works The method is called a float, or imprest, and it's simple. Decide a fixed amount for small expenses, for example ₦20,000. That's the float. Keep it in its own tin or envelope, separate from the sales drawer. Every small expense is paid from the float and written in the book. At the end of the week, add up what was spent and put exactly that amount back in. So the float always returns to ₦20,000. And at any moment, the cash in the tin plus the total written in the book since the last top-up must equal ₦20,000. If it doesn't, you know immediately. The format Details says what the money was for and who it was paid to. Voucher is the number of the receipt or slip that backs it up. Received is money put into the float. Paid is money spent. Balance is what should be in the tin. A sample week Here's an example. The figures are invented. Spent in the week: 1,500 + 6,000 + 800 + 2,200 = ₦10,500. The owner counts the tin, finds ₦9,500, checks the four slips, and puts back ₦10,500. The float is ₦20,000 again. Vouchers Each payment needs something behind it. Where a receipt exists, such as at the filling station, keep it. Number it and write that number in the Voucher column. Where there's no receipt, as with a loader or a bag of water, write a small slip: the date, the amount, what it was for, and the signature of the person who received the money or the staff member who paid it. A cheap duplicate booklet works. Keep the week's slips clipped together. When you top up, you're exchanging slips for cash: ₦10,500 of paper for ₦10,500 of money. Seeing where it goes After a month, group the payments under a few headings: This is where small expenses stop being small. ₦46,000 a month is over half a million naira a year. These figures also go straight into your monthly profit calculation, as shown in how to calculate profit and loss for a shop. Rules that keep it working Never pay expenses from the sales drawer. This is the whole point. The sales drawer should hold only the float for change plus the day's cash sales, so it can be balanced against the daily sales record book. If you truly must take from it, write the amount on that day's sales page as "paid out". One person keeps the petty cash. They hold the tin, pay out, and write the lines. Someone else, usually the owner, counts it and tops it up. Write the line at the time. Not at the end of the week from memory. Set a limit per payment. Anything above, say, ₦10,000 needs the owner's approval first. No loans. Petty cash is not for salary advances or for staff to borrow until Friday. If you allow an advance, pay it from elsewhere and record it properly. Count it by surprise. Now and then, count the tin without warning. Cash plus slips should equal the float. Top up by the exact amount spent. Rounding up hides small losses. Choosing the float Look at what you spent on small items in a normal week and set the float a little above that. Too small and you'll be topping up every other day. Too large and you have idle cash sitting where it can go missing. If the float keeps running out early, either expenses have gone up or something is being paid from it that shouldn't be. The book will show you which. Where it fits A small shop's daily money sits in three places, each with its own record: The sales drawer, checked each evening against the sales book. The petty cash tin, checked against the petty cash book. The bank account, checked against transfer and POS records. Keep the three apart and each one can be proved on its own. Mix them and a shortage in any could be a shortage in all, which is exactly the situation that makes losses impossible to trace. More on that in how to stop staff stealing from your shop.

  • POS machine for your shop: which kind you need and what to ask

    "POS" means three different things in Nigeria, and a lot of confusion comes from mixing them up. Before you compare prices, be sure which one you're shopping for. We haven't listed device prices or transaction charges here. They vary by provider, they change often, and we couldn't confirm a current set from the providers' own pages. The questions further down will get you real figures in one phone call. Three things called POS 1. The payment terminal is the handheld machine a customer taps or inserts a card into. It takes card payments and, on many models, shows incoming transfers. It moves money. It doesn't know what you sold. 2. The agent banking business is the kiosk on the corner where people withdraw cash and send money, for a fee. Same kind of device, but a different business. It's a service you sell, not a way of collecting for goods. 3. Point-of-sale software is a program on a phone, tablet or computer where each sale is entered by item. It works out the total, prints a receipt and reduces your stock. It may or may not connect to a payment terminal. A shop that says "I need a POS" usually needs the first. Some need the third as well. Very few need the second, and running it from the same counter causes problems, covered below. What a small shop needs For most small shops: one payment terminal, on a merchant account in the business's name. Customers increasingly don't carry cash. A shop that can only take cash or a transfer loses the customer whose bank app is down. A terminal gives them a third way to pay, and a card payment that's approved on your own machine is one you don't have to wonder about. You probably don't need point-of-sale software yet if you serve customers one at a time from a counter and a daily sales record book keeps up. It starts to earn its place when there's a queue at the till, when you carry hundreds of items, or when you have more than one branch. Questions to ask before you take a terminal Ask every provider the same questions and write the answers side by side. About the device What do I pay to get it? Is that a purchase, a deposit or a rental? If it's a deposit, is it refundable when I return the device, and on what conditions? Is there a monthly fee, or a minimum number of transactions I must do? What happens if it develops a fault? Who repairs or replaces it, and how fast? About charges What is charged on each card payment? A percentage, a flat fee, or both? Is there a cap? Who bears it, me or the customer? Are transfers into the account charged? What does it cost to move money from the terminal's account to my main bank account? About your money When does a payment reach my account? Instantly, same day or next day? Does that include weekends and public holidays? Is the account in my business name? About using it Which networks does it use, and does it work where my shop is? Ask a nearby trader which machines actually connect on your street. Does it print a receipt? What do paper rolls cost? Does it show a list of the day's transactions and an end-of-day total? Can I see transactions on my phone when I'm not in the shop? About problems If a customer is debited but the payment fails, how is it resolved, and how long does it take? Is there a person I can call? The cheapest device isn't the cheapest terminal. A slightly higher charge with instant settlement and working support can be worth more than a low fee on a machine that sits waiting for network. Using it properly Mark POS sales in your sales book in the "Paid by" column, so you have a POS total for the day. At closing, compare that total with the terminal's end-of-day summary. They should match. Keep the merchant copy of slips for larger sales. Wait for "Approved". A customer saying "it has gone" isn't the terminal saying so. If the machine shows declined or times out, the sale isn't paid. The same thinking as in fake transfer alerts applies. Don't let the terminal's account become a second till that nobody checks. Move the money to your main account on a fixed routine. Should you add agent services? Many shop owners are tempted to offer withdrawals and transfers from the same counter, for the fees. Think carefully. It mixes two pools of cash. When the drawer holds shop takings and agent float together, you can no longer tell whether the shop's cash is right. A shortage could be either business. It also takes your attendant's attention, puts more cash on the premises, and brings its own disputes over failed transactions. If you do it, run it as a separate business: its own float, its own drawer, its own record book, and its own daily balance. Never pay out a withdrawal from shop takings and "sort it out later". When software becomes worth it You've outgrown the notebook when sales happen faster than anyone can write them, when stock pages are always behind, or when you can't see what a second branch sold today. At that point you want a system where each sale is entered by item and by staff member, and stock moves with it. That's what we are building Tabs for. It hasn't launched yet. Until then, a terminal for payments and good paper records will run a small shop well. See how to manage stock in a small shop.

  • Reorder level formula, with a worked naira example

    Every shop owner knows the feeling of telling a regular customer "it has finished, come back on Thursday" and watching them walk to the shop next door. Running out of a fast seller costs more than the one sale. It teaches the customer where else to go. The reorder level is the number that prevents this. It is the stock level at which you place the next order, set high enough that the new goods arrive before the old ones run out. The formula Reorder level = (average daily sales × days the supplier takes) + safety stock Three inputs, all of which you can get from your own records. Average daily sales is how many you sell on a normal day. Take the last four weeks from your sales book, add up the units sold, and divide by the number of days you were open. Days the supplier takes, often called lead time, runs from the moment you decide to order until the goods are on your shelf. Count all of it: the day you call, the day they load, the day it travels, the morning you unpack. If you go to the market yourself, it's the number of days until your next trip. Safety stock is extra, kept for the week when sales jump or the supplier is late. A reasonable starting point for a small shop is two or three days of sales. Worked through For example, take tinned milk in a provision store. The numbers here are invented. Over the last four weeks, open six days a week, the shop sold 144 tins. That's 24 selling days, so 144 ÷ 24 = 6 tins a day. The distributor delivers 4 days after an order. The owner wants 2 days of safety stock, which is 12 tins. Reorder level = (6 × 4) + 12 = 36 tins. So when the shelf and store room together drop to 36 tins, the order goes in. During the four days of waiting the shop sells about 24, and the new stock arrives with roughly 12 still on hand. If the truck is two days late, those 12 tins cover it. What it costs to hold The formula has a price. At a cost of ₦2,800 a tin, 36 tins is ₦100,800 sitting on the shelf at the moment you reorder. That's the trade you are making. A bigger safety stock means fewer disappointed customers and more money tied up in goods. A smaller one frees cash and raises the chance of running out. For your top sellers, lean towards holding more. For slow lines, hold less, and read about what to do with slow-moving stock before it builds up. How much to order The reorder level tells you when. It doesn't tell you how much. A simple rule for a small shop: order enough to last until the next order you plan to make, plus the safety stock, minus what you'll still have when it arrives. If you want to order milk every two weeks, that's 12 selling days at 6 a day, so 72 tins. Then adjust for what the supplier actually sells. If cartons hold 24, order 3 cartons. If there is a price break at 5 cartons and you can sell them before they expire, that may be worth taking. If it only looks cheap because you'd be holding two months of stock, it isn't. When the number changes A reorder level is only right until something moves. Check it again when: the season turns. December, Easter, Ramadan and back-to-school weeks change what sells. Raise the level a few weeks ahead for the goods affected. the supplier gets slower. Fuel scarcity, bad roads in the rains and port delays all stretch lead time. If 4 days has become 7, the level for milk goes from 36 to 54. sales shift. A new estate opens nearby, or a competitor does. Rework the daily figure from the last four weeks, not from last year. Putting it to use You don't need this for every item. Start with the 20 products you would be most embarrassed to run out of. Work out the level for each one and write it at the top of that item's page in your stock record book. Then the rule for whoever keeps the book is simple. When the balance column reaches the number at the top of the page, tell the owner the same day. That one habit removes most stock-outs, and it works with a notebook and a pen.

  • Sales girl agreement and guarantor form: what to put in them

    Most shop owners hire with two pieces of paper: an agreement the new attendant signs, and a form signed by someone who vouches for them. Usually both were copied from another shop, and nobody is sure what half the lines are for. Each document does a different job. Here is what belongs in each, and what you shouldn't expect either of them to do. This is general information, not legal advice. For anything unusual, or for a role that handles large sums, have a lawyer draft or check your documents. The agreement The law already tells you part of what goes in it. Under section 7 of the Labour Act, an employer must give a worker a written statement not later than three months after they start. It has to state: the name of the employer and the business the worker's name and address, and the place and date they were engaged the nature of the job the end date, if the job is for a fixed period the notice either side must give to end it the wage, how it is worked out, and how and when it is paid hours of work, holidays and holiday pay, and what happens when the worker is sick or injured any special conditions That list is the skeleton. A shop should add the things that are specific to handling goods and money, because those are where arguments start: The records the job includes. For example: writing every sale in the sales book with your initials, issuing a receipt for every sale, and signing for deliveries you receive. How the day is closed. Who counts the cash, who checks transfers against the alerts, and who signs the page. Where payments go. One sentence saying that customer payments are made only in cash to the till, to the shop's POS, or to the shop's bank account, and never to a personal account. How stock is counted. That counts happen regularly and without notice, and that the attendant takes part. What happens when a count is short. Describe a process, not a punishment: recount, check records, discuss. Be careful here. Section 5 of the Labour Act does not let an employer fine a worker, and a deduction for loss caused by a worker's wilful misconduct or neglect needs the prior written consent of an authorised labour officer. Total deductions in a month can't exceed one-third of that month's wages. A clause saying "any shortage will be deducted from salary" promises something the law doesn't simply hand you. Notice. Section 11 sets minimum notice periods: one day in the first three months, one week after that up to two years, two weeks from two to five years, and one month from five years. Your agreement can state these. Write it in plain words, go through it together on the first day, and give the attendant a signed copy. Staff who were told the rules at the start take a stock count far less personally than staff who meet one for the first time during a disagreement. The guarantor form A guarantor form is a statement by a third person that they know your new attendant, vouch for them, and accept some responsibility if the shop loses money through that person's dishonesty. A useful one contains: the guarantor's full name, home address, phone number and occupation, with their work address how they know the attendant, and for how long a copy of a government ID, and a passport photograph a clear statement of what they are guaranteeing a limit, if there is one, on the amount their signature and the date, with a witness Checking the guarantor The form is only as good as the person behind it, and the checking is the part most owners skip. Meet the guarantor yourself. Don't accept a form that was taken away and brought back signed. Visit the address, or at least the workplace. Call the number while they are standing in front of you. Ask them, in your own words, whether they understand what they have signed. Keep the ID copy with the form. Be wary of a guarantor who has only known the applicant for a few weeks, or who is a relative with no income of their own. What these papers can't do A guarantor becomes useful after a loss. The form doesn't stop one. Whether you can actually recover money from a guarantor depends on how the document was written and on the facts, which is a question for a lawyer when the time comes. The agreement sets expectations. It doesn't check that they are met. What prevents losses is routine: a sale written down with a name against it, a day that is closed and signed, and a count nobody was warned about. Those are covered in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. The paperwork supports that routine. It doesn't replace it.

  • Sales girl duties and responsibilities: a job description you can use

    Most sales attendants in small shops are hired with one sentence: "You will be selling." Everything else is learned by being shouted at. Then the owner is surprised that the sales book is empty, the shelves are dusty and nobody counted the cash. People do the job they were told about. If recording sales was never named as part of the work, it's a favour, and favours stop when the shop gets busy. Below is a job description for a shop attendant, whether you call the role sales girl, sales boy, shop attendant or sales assistant. Take what fits your shop and write it down. The purpose of the job In one line: to serve customers well, and to account for every item sold and every naira received. Both halves matter. An attendant who sells a lot and records nothing is not doing the job. Daily duties Opening Open the shop at the agreed time. Sweep, dust the shelves and clean the counter. Count the float in the drawer and confirm it against yesterday's closing page. Check that shelves are filled, with older stock in front. Start a new page in the sales book with the date and your name. Serving customers Greet and attend to customers promptly and politely. Know the products, where they are and what they cost. Sell at the prices on the price list. No private prices. Suggest related items where it helps the customer. Handle complaints calmly, and call the owner for anything outside these duties. Recording Write every sale in the daily sales record book at the time it happens, with your initials. Issue a receipt for every sale. See how to write a receipt. Record anything damaged, expired, returned or taken for the house. Handling payment Accept payment only by cash to the till, on the shop's POS, or by transfer to the shop's account. Never give out a personal account number. Confirm transfers on the shop's own app before goods leave, as in fake transfer alerts. Count change back to the customer. Stock Refill shelves from the store room through the day. Tell the owner the same day when an item reaches its reorder level or finishes. Receive deliveries when assigned to: count before signing, and write what was counted. Take part in stock counts, including ones that aren't announced. Closing Total the sales page by cash, transfer, POS and credit. Count the cash and compare it with the cash total. Sign the page with the figures found. Send the day's report to the owner. Secure the cash as instructed, switch off appliances and lock up. What the role does not decide Arguments usually start in the gaps, so write these down too. Discounts. None, unless the owner has set a limit in writing. Credit. Only to customers on the owner's list, within each one's limit. Prices. The attendant reports a supplier's new price. The owner sets the selling price. Paying suppliers. The attendant receives goods. The owner pays. Taking goods or cash. Anything taken, even a sachet of water, is recorded first. What the owner owes in return A job description runs both ways. It's hard to hold someone to the list above if you don't keep yours. Pay the agreed wage, in full, on the agreed day. State the working hours, the days off and what happens during sickness. Train them. Show the records, don't just demand them. Provide what the job needs, such as a price list, a receipt booklet, a working pen and a float. Correct in private. Say when things are done well. Under the Labour Act, an employer must give a worker a written statement of the main terms within three months of starting. What that statement must contain, and how to set out the agreement and guarantor form, is covered in sales girl agreement and guarantor form. What to look for when hiring Selling ability is easy to spot and easy to overrate. For a role that handles your stock and your money, look just as hard for: Neat, complete writing. Ask them to copy five sales into a ruled page. You'll learn a lot. Comfort with figures. Give them three items and prices, and ask for the total and the change from ₦10,000. Punctuality. Notice whether they arrived on time for the interview. How they speak of their last employer. A guarantor you can actually verify. How to use this Print the duties. Go through them together on the first day, line by line, and let the new attendant ask questions. Both of you sign, and each keeps a copy. In the first two weeks, do the opening and closing alongside them until it's routine. Then review after a month: what's being done, what's being skipped, and whether what's skipped was ever properly shown. When something goes wrong later, you'll be pointing at a page you both signed. That's a far easier conversation than "you should have known". And the routines on that page are the same ones that keep stock and money from going missing, as set out in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. The job description says what the job is. Two other pages say when it's done and whether it was: a duty roster for the hours and days off, and an attendance register for who came and when.

  • Slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell

    Every shop has a shelf of it. The cream a rep talked you into, the phone cases for a model nobody carries now, the carton of a drink that sold well for one December. You stopped seeing it months ago. It isn't harmless. Those goods are money you already spent and can't use. Meanwhile you may be turning customers away because you can't afford another carton of the thing that sells every day. Finding it You need a rule, because "it's not moving" is a feeling and feelings go easy on your own buying decisions. A simple one: an item is slow if it hasn't sold in 60 days, and dead if it hasn't sold in 6 months. Tighten that for anything with an expiry date. For food and cosmetics, look at how long is left, not how long it has sat. If you keep a stock record book, this takes an hour. Go through the pages and look at the date of the last sale on each. If you don't keep one, do it by walking the shelves with a notebook, and be honest about what you see dust on. Write each item down with the quantity and what it cost you. What it's costing you Add up the cost value of everything on the list. Shop owners doing this for the first time are often looking at a figure equal to several weeks of profit. Here's an example of how to think about it, with made-up numbers. You have 30 units of a lotion that cost ₦2,500 each, so ₦75,000 is sitting there. Your fast-selling milk earns you ₦400 a tin and you sell through a carton of 24 every four days. ₦75,000 would buy about 26 tins at ₦2,800 a tin. Sold and restocked every four days, that money could have turned over seven times in a month, earning ₦400 a tin each time. That's roughly ₦70,000 a month the slow lotion is costing you by standing still. That's why selling slow stock at cost, or even below it, can be the profitable decision. You aren't taking a loss on the lotion. You are buying your cash back. Six ways out, in the order to try them 1. Move it. Before cutting any price, change where it sits. Put it at eye level, by the counter, or next to something it goes with. Goods on the bottom shelf in a back corner are slow partly because nobody sees them. Give this two weeks. 2. Have your staff mention it. A simple "we also have this one" at the counter sells more than people expect. Tell your attendants which items you want moved. 3. Bundle it. Pair the slow item with a fast one at a small saving. For example, a case that isn't selling goes with a screen protector that is. A slow soap goes three for the price of two and a half. 4. Discount in steps. Take 10% off for two weeks. If it still sits, 25%. Then cost price. Then below cost. Put a clear tag on it showing the old and new price. Don't jump straight to half price, and don't leave a discount running for months, or customers learn to wait. 5. Send it back or swap it. Ask your supplier whether they'll take it back, exchange it for a line that sells, or credit part of it against your next order. They won't always agree, but distributors do this more often than shop owners ask. Ask early. Nobody takes back goods a month from expiry. 6. Sell it to someone it suits. What's dead in your shop may sell in a different area. Another trader, a market seller or a buyer on Jiji may take the lot at a low price. A low price for all 30 today beats full price for two over the next year. If none of those work, write it off. Take it off the shelf, record the loss at cost in your stock book, and give it away or dispose of it properly. Expired goods must come off sale completely. Then use the space for something that earns. Why it happened Clearing the shelf is half the job. The other half is not refilling it. Look down your list and ask how each item got there. It is usually one of these: Bought too deep. You took five cartons of something untested because the price per carton was better. Buy new lines in the smallest quantity you can, and reorder if they sell. Bought on someone's word. A rep or another trader said it was moving. It was moving somewhere else. Bought for a season that ended. Festive and back-to-school goods have a short window. Buy less than you think and accept running out near the end. Replaced by something newer. Common with phone accessories and fashion. Check what customers are actually using before restocking. Hidden. It was never visible enough to sell. Then build two habits. Review slow stock on the same day every month, so nothing sits for a year. And reorder by numbers for your regular lines, using a reorder level based on what really sold. A shop's shelves should mostly hold things that will be gone within a few weeks. The closer you get to that, the more of your money is working.

  • Starting a pharmacy in Nigeria: what to budget for and what comes first

    People searching for the cost of opening a pharmacy usually want one number. We aren't going to give one. Rents, fit-out and stock vary too much by city and size, official fees change, and we couldn't confirm a current figure we'd stand behind. What we can give you is the order things have to happen in, and the list of costs to get real quotes for. That will get you to your own number, which is the only one that matters. This is general information, not regulatory or legal advice. Confirm every requirement with the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria before spending money. The regulator comes before the shop A pharmacy isn't an ordinary shop that you can open and sort the paperwork for later. The premises must be registered with the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria, known as PCN. PCN publishes its guidelines for the registration of pharmacists and pharmaceutical premises. In outline, they provide that: A registered pharmaceutical premises has a superintendent pharmacist, a pharmacist registered with PCN who is responsible for it. The superintendent pharmacist applies to register the premises, using the Council's form, through its zonal or state office, with supporting documents and the prescribed inspection and registration fees. Before registration, the premises is inspected for suitability: its location, its structure and its facilities. Two consequences for your budget and your timeline. First, if you are not a pharmacist, you need one. The licence is tied to a named superintendent pharmacist. Their pay is a core running cost, and your business depends on that relationship. Second, don't sign a long lease before you know the premises can pass inspection. Read the current guidelines for the requirements on location and layout, and speak to the PCN office for your state, before paying rent. Is it a pharmacy you want, or a patent medicine shop? They are different. A community pharmacy, with a pharmacist, can stock and dispense a full range of medicines. A patent and proprietary medicines vendor operates under a separate licence and is limited in what it may sell. The requirements, the permitted products and the costs differ. Decide which you are opening before you budget, and confirm the current rules for that category with PCN. The cost lines Get a real quote for each of these. Don't use ranges from articles, including this one. Before opening Every month Then add a reserve for at least three months of running costs. A new pharmacy rarely covers its costs in its first weeks. Opening stock is where most of the money goes A pharmacy can carry well over a thousand product lines. The temptation is to stock everything, so no customer is ever turned away. That's how new pharmacies run out of cash with full shelves. Start with what your area needs. Ask your pharmacist. Look at what nearby clinics prescribe and who lives around you. Buy fast movers in depth and everything else thinly. A wholesaler who delivers within a day or two lets you hold less. Keep back part of your stock budget. The first month will show you what your customers actually ask for. Check dates on every delivery. Stock that arrives with a short shelf life is a loss you've already paid for. Use a goods received note. Buy only from sources your pharmacist approves. Counterfeit medicines are a danger to patients and to your licence. Why stock control decides whether it survives A pharmacy has every stock problem at once. The goods are small and valuable. There are a great many lines. Everything expires. Some items need cold storage, and some have strict record-keeping rules. So the habits have to start on day one: A stock record for every line, kept by batch and expiry date. A bin card on the shelf is the traditional way. First to expire, first out, every time a shelf is filled. A monthly list of everything within six months of its date, and action on it. Weekly counts of high-value items. A full count, section by section, on a regular cycle. The method is in how to do stock-taking in a pharmacy. Expired stock is usually the largest avoidable loss in a pharmacy. It's also the easiest to reduce, because it gives you months of warning if anyone is looking. The order to do things in Decide: community pharmacy or patent medicine shop. Read PCN's current guidelines and speak to the office for your state. Secure your superintendent pharmacist, if you aren't one. Find premises that meet the requirements, and confirm before committing. Get quotes for every line above and add the reserve. Register the business and apply for premises registration. Fit out, pass inspection, then buy stock. Set up your records before the first delivery arrives. Number 7 matters. Stock bought before the premises is approved is money sitting in cartons, with expiry dates running.

  • Stock record book format, with a filled-in example

    Most stock books fail for the same reason. Everything goes on one page, in the order it happened, and by the second week nobody can tell how many tins of milk are meant to be on the shelf without reading forty lines. The fix is one page per item. Each product gets its own page, and that page only ever answers one question: how many of this should we have right now? The format Rule a hardback notebook like this. At the top of the page, write the item, the unit you count it in, what it costs you, what you sell it for, and the level at which you reorder. Date is the day it happened, not the day you remembered to write it. Details says what happened: sold, received, damaged, returned, taken for the house. In is what came into the shop. Out is what left, for any reason. Balance is what should now be on the shelf. Sign is the initials of whoever wrote the line. That is the whole format. Six columns. A page filled in Here is one page for one product over a week. The figures are made up, but the entries are the kind a provision store sees. Item: Milo 500g tin. Unit: tin. Cost: ₦3,900. Selling price: ₦4,500. Reorder at: 24. A few things to notice. Sales are one line per day, not one line per customer. The daily figure comes from your sales book, so this book stays short. The balance on 2 October hit the reorder level of 24, and the delivery arrived the next day. The dented tin has its own line, so it doesn't turn into an unexplained shortage later. The last line is the one most books leave out. On 6 October someone counted the shelf and found 32, not 33. The book is corrected to match the shelf, and the missing tin is written down as a fact with a date. One tin is ₦3,900. Now you know. If you sell hundreds of items A page per item is right for the goods that matter: anything expensive, fast or easy to carry away. For a shop with 400 lines, nobody is going to keep 400 pages moving every day. So split it. Keep full pages for your top 30 to 50 items. For the rest, use a weekly sheet with one line per item: "Should be" is opening plus received, minus sold and damaged. Then you count, and write what you find. What makes a stock book useless Writing it from memory. A book filled in on Saturday for the whole week is a story, not a record. The line goes in on the day. No line for anything except sales. Goods leave a shop in other ways, such as breakage, expiry, returns to the supplier, items taken home, samples given out. If the book has no place for them, they all show up as "missing". Never writing down a count. A book that is never checked against the shelf drifts further from the truth every week. The count line is what keeps it honest. If you haven't done one before, here is how to take stock without closing the shop. No cost price on the page. Without it you know you are three tins short. With it you know you are ₦11,700 short, which is the number that gets attention. Pencil, and torn pages. Write in pen. When you make a mistake, rule one line through it and write the correct figure beside it. A book that can be quietly changed proves nothing when you need it to. One person writes everything. Whoever receives a delivery signs for it. Whoever sold signs the day's line. Initials cost nothing and they are what you will want when a shortage needs explaining. The stock book also needs a partner. It tells you what should be on the shelf, and the daily sales record book tells you what money should be in the drawer. Each one checks the other.

  • How to do stock-taking in a pharmacy

    Counting a pharmacy is harder than counting most shops, for three reasons. There are far more products, often well over a thousand lines in a small space. Many are tiny and expensive. And every one of them has a date after which it can't be sold. In a provision store, a count asks "how many?" In a pharmacy it has to ask "how many, from which batch, expiring when?" That extra question changes how you set it up. This guide is about the counting. It isn't regulatory advice. Follow your superintendent pharmacist and the current requirements of the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria and NAFDAC on storage, record-keeping and controlled medicines. The count sheet Rule one sheet per shelf or drawer. Two things are different from an ordinary count sheet. Strength and pack matter, because 500mg tablets in a pack of 10 and the same medicine in a pack of 100 are separate stock lines. And each batch gets its own row, because two boxes of the same product can have expiry dates a year apart. Decide your units before you start Most pharmacy count errors are unit errors. One person counts boxes, another counts strips, a third counts loose tablets from an opened pack. Pick a counting unit for each product and write it on the sheet. A workable rule for a community pharmacy: Sealed packs are counted as packs. An opened pack is counted in the unit you sell it by, usually strips or sachets, and recorded on its own line as "opened". Liquids, creams and injectables are counted as bottles, tubes or ampoules. Whatever you choose, keep it the same from one count to the next, and make sure it's the unit your stock record uses. Counting, shelf by shelf Work in the order the stock is arranged. If your shelves run alphabetically or by therapeutic group, the sheets should follow the same order. Take everything off one shelf section, wipe it, and put the stock back as you count. Pharmacies collect loose strips at the back of shelves like nothing else. Group each product by batch and read the expiry date off the pack. Don't rely on the last sheet. Put stock back with the earliest expiry at the front, so it sells first. Write the count before moving on. Then mark the shelf as done. Leave the Book balance column until the section is finished, so the counter isn't guided by the expected figure. You don't need to close for this. Count one bay a day in the quiet hours. If something is sold from a bay already counted, note it on a slip and subtract it before comparing. The general method is the same as in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. The expiry list The count is the best chance you get to find stock that's running out of time. As you go, keep a second sheet for anything expiring within the next six months. The figures above are placeholders to show the layout. Then act on the list while there is still time to act: Stop reordering the product until the old batch has gone. Move it forward so it's the first pack anyone picks up. Ask your wholesaler about their returns or exchange terms. Many will only consider stock with several months left, which is why six months is the right moment to ask and six weeks is too late. Remove expired stock from the selling area straight away. Keep it apart, clearly labelled, and dispose of it the way your regulator requires. Record it as a loss with its cost value. Run the expiry list every month, even in months when you don't count everything. Items that need more than a monthly count Some stock shouldn't wait for the regular cycle. High-value lines, such as certain injectables and branded chronic medicines, are worth counting weekly. They are small, they are costly, and one missing pack can equal a day's profit. Controlled medicines have their own legal rules on storage and registers. Keep to those, and reconcile the register against physical stock as often as the rules and your superintendent pharmacist require. Cold-chain items should be counted quickly, with the fridge open as briefly as possible. Count them from the fridge's own list. Reading the differences When the count and the book disagree, pharmacies have a few causes of their own to rule out before thinking the worst: a sale recorded against the wrong strength or pack size strips sold from an opened pack and recorded as a whole pack, or the other way round stock received and shelved before it was entered samples or free goods from a supplier that were never recorded expired stock thrown away without a record If none of those explain it and the same products are short month after month, treat it as you would in any shop. How to stop staff stealing from your shop covers how to narrow it down fairly. Afterwards, correct the book to the shelf with a dated line, and keep the sheets. A year of expiry lists will show you which products you keep over-buying, and that is where a pharmacy's stock losses are usually largest.

Worth pulling out.

The posts we point people to first.

  • Daily sales record book format, with a sample page

    The sales book templates you find online were mostly designed for a shop that takes cash. A Nigerian shop takes cash, bank transfers and POS, often all three within ten minutes. A book with one "Amount" column can't tell you why the money in the drawer is ₦40,000 less than the sales total, when the answer is simply that ₦40,000 came in by transfer. So the format needs one more column than the usual template: how the customer paid. The format Start a new page every day. Write the date at the top and the name of whoever opened the shop. No. numbers the sales from 1 each day. Price is the price for one. Amount is quantity times price. Paid by is Cash, Transfer, POS or Credit. Sold by is the initials of the person who made the sale. A sample page Here's an example. The figures are invented. The mix of payments is typical. Monday 5 October. Opened by: CN. At the bottom of the page, add it up by payment type: Closing the day This is the part that makes the book worth keeping. It takes about ten minutes. Cash. Count the drawer. Take away the float you started with. What's left should equal the cash total, less anything paid out of the till during the day. Transfers. Open the bank app and add up the day's credit alerts. They should equal the transfer total. Every alert should match a line in the book, and every transfer line should have an alert. POS. Print or view the terminal's end-of-day summary. It should equal the POS total. Credit. Copy each credit sale into your debtors' list with the customer's name. Credit is a sale, but it is not money yet. Sign. Whoever closed writes the three figures they found and signs the page. If cash is short, you'll see it tonight, while everyone still remembers the day. If a transfer line has no alert, you'll see that too. Customers do sometimes show a "successful" screen for a payment that never arrives, and tonight is a better time to find out than the end of the month. Money that leaves the till Shops pay for things out of the drawer all day, such as a loader, fuel for the generator, water, or change borrowed for a neighbour. If those aren't written down, the cash will never balance and nobody will be able to say why. Keep a small box at the bottom of each page headed "Paid out", with what it was for, the amount, and who took it. Then the cash check becomes: float, plus cash sales, minus paid out, equals what's in the drawer. The mistakes that spoil it Writing "sundries ₦6,000" for a group of items. The sales book feeds your stock record, and "sundries" can't be taken off any shelf. Write the items. Recording a credit sale as cash "because she always pays". She may. Until she does, the drawer will be short by exactly that amount. Leaving the Sold by column empty. When each sale carries a name, a shortage has a starting point and honest staff aren't under the same cloud as everyone else. There is more on that in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. Skipping the close because the shop was busy. A busy day is the day the check matters most. The sales book tells you what money should exist. Its partner is the stock record book, which tells you what goods should exist. Each day's sales lines are what you post into the stock pages, one total per item.

  • How to manage stock in a small shop in Nigeria

    Stock is where a shop's money lives. A provision store with ₦3 million of goods on the shelves and ₦40,000 in the drawer has nearly all its wealth in tins and cartons. Yet most owners count the ₦40,000 every night and the ₦3 million once a year. Stock control sounds like something for supermarkets with scanners. It isn't. At the size of a small shop it comes down to five habits, and all of them can run on a notebook. 1. Know what you sell Write a list of every product, with the unit you count it in, what it costs you and what you sell it for. It's dull work and it pays back immediately. Most owners doing it for the first time find items they forgot they had, items priced below what they now cost, and two or three products that take up a whole shelf and haven't sold since Easter. Be exact about what counts as one product. A 400g tin and a 900g tin of the same milk are two products. So are the red and the black of the same phone case, if customers ask for them by colour. 2. Write down everything that comes in and goes out Stock changes for only a few reasons: you received goods, you sold goods, or something else happened to them. Damage, expiry, a return to the supplier, an item taken for the house. Each of those gets written down on the day. Sales go in a daily sales record book. Everything, including each day's sales total per item, goes on that item's page in a stock record book, which keeps a running balance of what should be on the shelf. If you only do one thing from this guide, do this for your 30 most important items. 3. Count, and compare A record nobody checks drifts away from the truth. The count is what pulls it back. You don't need to close. Count a section a day, and count your most valuable items weekly on a day that changes. Compare each count with the book balance and write the difference down in naira. The full method, with a count sheet, is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. When the shelf and the book disagree, the cause is one of three things: a recording mistake, damage nobody reported, or theft. Regular counts are how you tell them apart. A random difference now and then is error. The same items short every week is a pattern, and this guide to staff theft covers what to do about it. 4. Reorder by numbers, not by feeling Running out of a fast seller sends your customer to a competitor. Buying too much of a slow one locks up money you need for the fast one. Both come from ordering by eye. For each important item, work out a reorder level. A reorder level is the balance at which you place the next order, based on how many you sell a day and how long your supplier takes. Write it at the top of the item's page. The arithmetic is in reorder level formula, with a worked naira example. 5. Deal with what isn't selling Every shop has goods that have sat for months. They look like stock. In practice they are cash you can't spend, and some of them are getting closer to an expiry date. Once a month, go through your stock pages and mark anything with no sale in 60 days. Then decide: move it, bundle it, discount it, return it or write it off. The options, and how to choose, are in slow-moving stock: what to do with goods that won't sell. For anything with an expiry date, put new stock behind old stock every time you fill a shelf, so the oldest sells first. Two things that sit alongside stock control Pricing. Your records give you the true cost of each item, which is the only sound basis for a price. Many shops believe they make 20% and make less. See markup vs margin. People. Records only work if the people handling goods and money keep them. Put initials on every entry, and make closing the day a fixed routine. If you want the shop to run without you in it, this is how. A weekly rhythm When the notebook stops being enough A notebook handles one shop, a few hundred products and two or three staff. It starts to strain when the product list grows past what one person can keep posted each evening, when you open a second branch, or when you sell in the shop and online from the same shelf. The signs are easy to spot: the stock pages are a week behind, the count takes so long it gets skipped, and you no longer trust the balances. That's the point where software earns its place, and it's what we are building Tabs for. It hasn't launched yet. Whenever you do move to a system, the five habits above are what make it work. A system given bad records only gets to the wrong answer faster.

  • How to run your shop when you're not there

    There is a kind of shop owner who hasn't travelled for a wedding in four years. Not because the business is failing. Because it only works when they are standing in it. When you ask why, the answer is nearly always the same: "If I'm not there, things go missing." What that usually means is that the owner is the system. They hold the prices in their head, they notice what is running low, and their presence is the only control on the till. Getting your life back doesn't require trusting people more. It requires moving those jobs out of your head and onto paper, so the shop reports to you whether you are there or not. What you need to see each day You can't watch the shop from another town, and you don't need to. You need five pieces of information to reach you every evening. The sales page. A photo of the day's page from the sales record book, with totals for cash, transfer, POS and credit. The closing figures. Cash counted in the drawer, signed by whoever closed. The bank alerts. These already come to your phone. Each one should match a transfer line on the sales page. Anything received. A photo of the supplier's invoice for any delivery, signed by the person who checked it in. Anything unusual. For example, goods damaged, a customer complaint, or an item that has finished. Sent as five WhatsApp messages at closing, that takes your staff about five minutes. Reading them takes you about the same. The point isn't to study every line. It's that the page exists, the totals agree with your alerts, and everyone knows you look. A shop where the evening report is expected behaves differently from one where nobody asks. The check that doesn't depend on reports Reports are written by the people you are checking, so you need one figure they can't shape. That figure is the stock count. Pick 20 items that are valuable or fast-moving. Once a week, have them counted on a day nobody knew in advance, by someone who doesn't sell: a relative, a friend who owes you a favour, or you on a surprise visit. Compare the counts with the stock book. If sales reports say 30 tins were sold and 38 are gone from the shelf, you know something no report was going to tell you. The method is in how to take stock in a shop. Decide who decides Half the phone calls an absent owner gets are questions with no owner-level answer. Can I give this customer a discount? The supplier came with a different price, should I take it? Can Mama Tobi take goods on credit? Write the answers down once. A price list, on the wall, that staff follow. If a discount is ever allowed, say how much and who can give it. A credit list: the customers who may take goods on credit, and the limit for each. Nobody else. A rule for deliveries: accept only what was ordered, at the agreed price, and call you if either is different. One person in charge when you are away. Not two, and not "whoever is around". What stays with you Being absent from the shop is not the same as letting go of it. Keep these in your own hands. The money. Customer transfers go to the business account, which only you operate. Cash above an agreed float is banked or sent to you on set days, not left to pile up. Paying suppliers. Staff receive goods. You pay for them. Splitting those two jobs closes one of the easiest routes for losses. Prices. Staff can tell you a supplier's price has gone up. You decide the new selling price. The count. At least once a month, be there in person and count something yourself. Handing over between staff If more than one person runs the shop across the day or the week, the changeover is where things vanish, because each can say it happened on the other's shift. Make the changeover a count. The person leaving and the person arriving count the cash and the 20 key items together, and both sign the figures. It takes ten minutes, and from then on every shortage belongs to a known shift. Three pieces of paper hold a changeover together. A duty roster says who is meant to be there. An opening and closing checklist says what they do first and last. A handing over note carries what one shift knows to the next. Where software comes in Everything above works on paper and WhatsApp, and you should start it that way this week. Its weakness is that it depends on people sending photos and on you adding up columns. That's the gap we are building Tabs for: each sale recorded under the name of the person who made it, stock that drops as sales happen, and the day's figures visible from wherever you are. It hasn't launched yet. The routine above is the right foundation either way, because software can only report what a shop has agreed to record. Start with the evening report. Run it for two weeks while you are still in the shop, so the habit is settled before you rely on it. Then take a Saturday off and see what arrives on your phone.

  • How to sell on Jiji when you also run a shop

    Putting your goods on Jiji is not the hard part. The posting form takes a few minutes. The hard part comes later, when someone calls from across town about the blue one, drives over, and finds you sold it yesterday. This guide covers both: getting adverts live, and running Jiji alongside a physical shop without disappointing people. The posting steps and rules below are taken from Jiji's own help page as it stood on 6 October 2026. Jiji changes its screens from time to time, so treat its page as the final word. Posting an advert Sign in to your Jiji profile, or register if you don't have one. Tap Sell. Choose the category that fits the item. Upload your photos. Write a clear title and a detailed description. Enter your price. Check everything, then tap Post Ad. The advert doesn't appear straight away. Jiji reviews it against its rules first and emails you when it is approved. If something is wrong, the email says what to change. What gets an advert rejected Most rejections come from the photos. Jiji says photos must be good quality, must be your own, and must show the actual item in the right category. They must not include: contact details or prices written on the image logos, including Jiji's screenshots or pictures taken from elsewhere several different items in one picture The title can't contain repeated words or contact details. The description has to be about the item. The price should be within the normal market range, and you can't post the same advert twice. For a shop owner the practical lesson is this: photograph your own stock, on your own counter, one item per picture. Catalogue images from the supplier's WhatsApp are exactly what gets refused. Writing an advert that gets calls Put what a buyer would type into the title: brand, model, size or capacity, and condition. "Samsung A15 128GB, new, sealed" will be found. "Clean phone for sale" won't. In the description, answer the questions you get asked every day in the shop. Is it new or used? What comes in the box? Is there a warranty, and from whom? Where is your shop, and what hours are you open? Give a real price. Adverts priced at ₦1 or "call for price" waste the buyer's time and yours, and Jiji's rules expect a market-range figure anyway. Running Jiji next to a physical shop Only advertise what you can hand over today. If you have two of something, both can go quickly, so check the shelf before you say "yes, it's available" on the phone. The surest way to keep this straight is a stock record you trust. If yours has drifted, start with a stock record book for the items you advertise. Take adverts down when stock runs out. Make it one person's job, at closing, to compare the day's sales with what is live on Jiji and close anything that's gone. Ten minutes a day prevents most wasted journeys. Keep one price. For example, if the advert says ₦85,000 and your attendant quotes ₦90,000 at the counter, the buyer assumes they're being cheated. Whoever answers the Jiji calls needs the same price list as the shop floor. Invite buyers to the shop. A physical address is your advantage over sellers who only meet at bus stops. Buyers can inspect the item, and you can issue a proper receipt. Record Jiji sales like any other sale. They go in the same daily sales book, with a note that the customer came from Jiji. After a month you'll know how much of your turnover the adverts bring in, which is what tells you whether paying to promote them is worth it. Paying for more visibility Posting does not require buying anything. Jiji sells Premium Services, called TOP and Boost packages, for sellers who want their adverts shown more prominently. Whether that's worth it depends on your margins, and it's a decision better made with a month of your own sales figures in hand. We've covered it separately in Jiji premium packages explained, and there are free things to fix first in how to get more customers on Jiji.

  • How to stop staff stealing from your shop

    The shop is busy. Customers come in all day; the shelves empty and get refilled, and the sales book looks healthy. Then you sit down at the end of the month, and the money doesn't match the goods that left. Not by a frightening amount. Just enough that you start watching people. In August 2025, police in Niger State arrested a sales attendant from a phone shop in Minna. The owner put the missing phones and cash at ₦29 million. According to the police account reported by Premium Times, she told them she had worked there since 2023 and couldn't say whether what she had taken added up to that much. That last detail is the one worth sitting with. Goods and cash can leave a shop for so long that even the person taking them loses count. Most owners try to solve this by catching a thief. They buy a camera, they sit in the shop, they change staff every few months. What actually works is duller and cheaper: set the shop up so that a loss shows itself within days, while it is still small enough to talk about. How stock and money actually leave a shop It helps to be specific, because each route has a different fix. The sale nobody wrote down. The customer pays cash, the item leaves, nothing goes in the book. The cash goes in a pocket and, on paper, the item is still on your shelf. The transfer to the wrong account. The customer asks to pay by transfer and gets a personal account number, or a POS terminal that isn't yours. The top-up. Your price is ₦12,000. You told the customer ₦13,500, and they paid it. Your book says ₦12,000. Your stock and cash both balance, which is why many owners never find this. Your customers are being overcharged in your name. Goods through the back. Items passed to a friend, "sold" on a credit that never gets paid, or carried home in a bag. The short delivery. The supplier's invoice says ten cartons. Nine reach the store room. Borrowing from the till. Usually with a sincere plan to put it back on Friday. Then there are the losses that are nobody's crime. A delivery that was miscounted on arrival. Wrong change on a rushed afternoon. A bottle that broke and got swept up quietly. Goods given on credit to a regular customer and forgotten. A size 42 sold and recorded as a size 44. A shortage tells you something is wrong with your records or with your people. On its own, it doesn't tell you which. Keep that in mind before you look at anyone differently. Find the gap before you look for the person Everything depends on knowing one number: what should be on the shelf. What you had, plus what came in, minus what was recorded as sold, is what should be there. Then you count what is there. Here is an example with made-up figures. You sell a body cream at ₦4,500. On Monday morning there are 48 on the shelf. On Wednesday your supplier delivers 24. By Saturday night the sales book shows 31 sold. 48 plus 24 is 72, less 31 is 41. You count the shelf and find 38. Three are missing. That's ₦13,500 in one week, on one product, in a shop that felt like it was running fine. You don't need to count the whole shop to do this. Pick the ten to twenty items most worth taking: small, expensive and fast-moving. In a phone shop that's handsets, power banks and earbuds. In a provision store it's tinned milk, spirits and the better creams. Count those every week and leave the full stock-take for once a month or once a quarter. Three habits make the count worth trusting. Do it yourself, or give it to someone who doesn't sell. Don't count on the same day every week. And write the result down with the date, because this week's count is next week's opening figure. One gap is a question. The same gap on the same items three weeks running, especially if it follows one person's shifts, is close to an answer. Close the easy routes Most of the routes above stay open for one reason: a single person sells the item, collects the money and writes the record. Nobody else ever sees the whole transaction. You close them by putting a second pair of eyes somewhere in that chain. Split the jobs. With two staff, one attends to the customer and the other collects payment and writes the receipt. With one, keep two jobs for yourself: receiving deliveries and doing the count. Use one account for transfers. Print the business account name and number and put it where customers can read it, with a line saying that payment to any other account is not payment to the shop. Have the alerts come to your phone. The same goes for the POS terminal: one machine, settling to the business. Give a receipt for every sale. Use a numbered duplicate booklet. A missing number is something you ask about that evening. Put up a small sign telling customers to ask for their receipt, with your own phone number on it. That quietly turns every customer into a checker. It also gives people a way to reach you. The ACFE's 2026 Report to the Nations, a study of 2,402 fraud cases inside organisations in 143 countries, found that 43% came to light through a tip, far more than through any audit or review, and that the typical scheme had been running for about 12 months by then. That study covers organisations of every size around the world, not Nigerian shops. The lesson travels anyway: the people standing nearest the problem usually know first, and they need somewhere to say it. Put a name on every sale. Initials beside each line in the sales book are enough. When each person signs for what they sold, a shortage has somewhere to start. It also protects your honest staff, who otherwise share the suspicion equally with whoever is responsible. Close every day. Cash in the drawer plus the day's transfer alerts should equal the day's recorded sales. It takes ten minutes, and whoever closes signs the page. Display your prices. A price tag on the shelf or a printed list on the wall ends the top-up, because the customer can see what you charge. About the two things owners reach for first. A camera is worth having. It discourages the casual attempt, and once your count has pointed at a particular afternoon, the footage can show you what happened. But a camera can't tell you that a carton is missing, and nobody watches twelve hours of video a day. Sitting in the shop yourself works very well, right up to the week you fall ill or open a second branch. What a guarantor form does, and what it doesn't Almost every owner asks new staff for a guarantor, and it is worth doing. It shows you whether anyone is prepared to vouch for this person, and it gives you a route to recover money if things go badly. It only does those things if you verify it. Meet the guarantor. Go to the address. Keep a copy of their ID, and make sure they understand what they signed. A form signed by someone you can't find is just paper. And remember when a guarantor becomes useful: after the loss. The form is not a control. It doesn't replace the weekly count, and owners who treat it as protection tend to stop counting. A short written agreement helps for a different reason. It sets out what the job includes: which records the person keeps, how the day is closed, and what happens when a count comes up short. Staff who were told the rules on the first day take the count far less personally than staff who meet it for the first time in an argument. Pay on time, as well. That isn't a comment on anyone's character. A person who is owed two months' salary and handles your cash every day is a risk you created yourself. When the numbers point at someone Don't accuse anyone on the strength of one count. Count again. Check the delivery notes and the credit book. Then sit down privately and ask the person to walk you through the records for those days. A good number of these conversations end with a mistake found and corrected, and you'll be glad you asked instead of announcing. If it isn't a mistake, be careful with the usual response, which is "I will remove it from your salary." Section 5 of the Labour Act doesn't leave that decision to the employer. You can't fine a worker. A reasonable deduction for loss caused by a worker's wilful misconduct or neglect is allowed, but only with the prior written consent of an authorised labour officer, and total deductions in any month can't exceed one-third of that month's wages. Theft itself is a matter for the police, and this is where your records pay for themselves a second time. Dated counts, numbered receipts and a signed sales book are evidence. "I just know" is not. Whatever you find, don't lock anyone in, don't lay hands on them, and don't parade them or post them online. Apart from being wrong, it can turn you into the one answering questions at the station. This is general information and not legal advice. For a large loss, talk to a lawyer before you act. All of this runs on a notebook, a receipt booklet and an hour a week, and plenty of shops run it exactly that way. It gets heavier as the shop grows: more products to count, more staff to initial, a second branch you can't visit daily. That's the point where software earns its place, because it does the arithmetic as each sale happens. That's what we are building Tabs to do: stock that moves when a sale is recorded, and a name and time on everything staff do. It hasn't launched yet, so for now the notebook version is the one to use. Start this week with the smallest version. Twenty items, one count, one account for transfers and initials on every sale. If the numbers agree, you've bought peace of mind cheaply. If they don't, you've found out while the number is still small.

  • How to take stock in a shop without closing for the day

    The reason most shops take stock once a year, if at all, is that it means locking the door for a day. A day closed is a day's sales gone, so the count keeps getting moved to next month. You don't have to close. Count the shop in pieces, one section at a time, while it stays open. A provision store split into six sections is fully counted in a week at about half an hour a day. Before you count Divide the shop into sections that one person can count in 30 to 40 minutes. Go by where things physically sit, not by category. For example: left wall top shelves, left wall bottom shelves, the counter display, the fridge, the store room. Give each section a name and write the list down. The same sections get used every time. Then rule your count sheet. One sheet per section. Fill in the Item and Unit columns before you start, in the order the goods sit on the shelf. Leave the Book balance column empty for now. That's deliberate, and it matters. The count Pick a quiet time. For most shops that's the first hour after opening or the slow stretch in mid-afternoon. Tidy the section first. Pull forward anything pushed to the back, and bring out cartons of the same item from under the shelf so they are counted together. Count from one end to the other, top shelf to bottom. Write each figure down the moment you have it. Count in the unit on the sheet. If the sheet says tins, open cartons get counted as tins. A sealed carton of 24 is 24. Put a small sticker or chalk mark on each shelf as you finish it, so nothing is counted twice or skipped. Only when the section is done, copy in the book balance for each item and work out the difference. The person counting should not know the book balance in advance. Someone who knows the book says 48 tends to find 48. That's the reason the column stays empty until the end, and the reason the best counter is someone who doesn't sell from that section. Sales made while you are counting This is what puts people off counting during opening hours, and it has a simple answer. Keep a scrap of paper in the section. If a customer buys something from a shelf you have already counted, write it down: item and quantity. If they buy from a shelf you haven't reached, do nothing, because the count will pick it up. At the end, subtract the noted sales from your counted figures before you compare with the book. Three tins sold from a counted shelf means the shelf figure you compare is three lower. Reading the result Here is part of a sheet from an imaginary provision store. Small differences in both directions are usually recording mistakes. One over on sardines probably means a sale was written against the wrong item. Six cans short is different. Before deciding what it means, check three things. Was the last delivery really the quantity on the invoice? Is there a carton in the store room that wasn't counted? Were any given out on credit and not written down? If all three come back clean, you have a real shortage, and it is worth reading about how stock and money leave a shop. Put a value on it either way. Six cans at a cost of ₦700 is ₦4,200. Shortages feel different once they are in naira. After the count Correct the book to match the shelf. In your stock record book, write a line that says "Counted on shelf" with the date and the real figure, so the book starts the next week telling the truth. Don't quietly change the old balance. The correction is part of the record. Keep the count sheets in a file. After three months they show you things a single count can't: which items are short again and again, and which section they sit in. How often There isn't one right answer, but this works for most small shops. Count your 20 most valuable or fastest items every week, on a day that changes. Count the whole shop, section by section, once a month. Do one full count on a single day at the end of the year, when you want a clean figure for your accounts. A weekly count of 20 items takes 15 minutes. It's the cheapest protection a shop has.

  • Stock record book format, with a filled-in example

    Most stock books fail for the same reason. Everything goes on one page, in the order it happened, and by the second week nobody can tell how many tins of milk are meant to be on the shelf without reading forty lines. The fix is one page per item. Each product gets its own page, and that page only ever answers one question: how many of this should we have right now? The format Rule a hardback notebook like this. At the top of the page, write the item, the unit you count it in, what it costs you, what you sell it for, and the level at which you reorder. Date is the day it happened, not the day you remembered to write it. Details says what happened: sold, received, damaged, returned, taken for the house. In is what came into the shop. Out is what left, for any reason. Balance is what should now be on the shelf. Sign is the initials of whoever wrote the line. That is the whole format. Six columns. A page filled in Here is one page for one product over a week. The figures are made up, but the entries are the kind a provision store sees. Item: Milo 500g tin. Unit: tin. Cost: ₦3,900. Selling price: ₦4,500. Reorder at: 24. A few things to notice. Sales are one line per day, not one line per customer. The daily figure comes from your sales book, so this book stays short. The balance on 2 October hit the reorder level of 24, and the delivery arrived the next day. The dented tin has its own line, so it doesn't turn into an unexplained shortage later. The last line is the one most books leave out. On 6 October someone counted the shelf and found 32, not 33. The book is corrected to match the shelf, and the missing tin is written down as a fact with a date. One tin is ₦3,900. Now you know. If you sell hundreds of items A page per item is right for the goods that matter: anything expensive, fast or easy to carry away. For a shop with 400 lines, nobody is going to keep 400 pages moving every day. So split it. Keep full pages for your top 30 to 50 items. For the rest, use a weekly sheet with one line per item: "Should be" is opening plus received, minus sold and damaged. Then you count, and write what you find. What makes a stock book useless Writing it from memory. A book filled in on Saturday for the whole week is a story, not a record. The line goes in on the day. No line for anything except sales. Goods leave a shop in other ways, such as breakage, expiry, returns to the supplier, items taken home, samples given out. If the book has no place for them, they all show up as "missing". Never writing down a count. A book that is never checked against the shelf drifts further from the truth every week. The count line is what keeps it honest. If you haven't done one before, here is how to take stock without closing the shop. No cost price on the page. Without it you know you are three tins short. With it you know you are ₦11,700 short, which is the number that gets attention. Pencil, and torn pages. Write in pen. When you make a mistake, rule one line through it and write the correct figure beside it. A book that can be quietly changed proves nothing when you need it to. One person writes everything. Whoever receives a delivery signs for it. Whoever sold signs the day's line. Initials cost nothing and they are what you will want when a shortage needs explaining. The stock book also needs a partner. It tells you what should be on the shelf, and the daily sales record book tells you what money should be in the drawer. Each one checks the other.

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