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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.

By Tabs Team · Oct 6, 2026

  • 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.

  • First in, first out: how FIFO works in a provision store

    First in, first out means the goods that came into your shop first are the first to leave. It sounds too obvious to need a name. But it describes two separate things, and a shop needs both. One is physical: which tin you hand to the customer. The other is arithmetic: which cost you use when you work out your profit. FIFO on the shelf Left alone, a shop does the opposite. New stock arrives, someone pushes it onto the front of the shelf, and customers buy the new tins while last month's sit at the back, getting older. Six months later you find twelve tins of milk that expired in a place nobody looks. The rule that prevents it: When a delivery arrives, bring the old stock forward to the front of the shelf. Put the new stock behind it. In the store room, stack new cartons behind or beneath the old ones, and take from the old stack first. Sell from the front. That's all. It adds a minute to restocking a shelf. A few things make it stick. Write the delivery date on each carton with a marker when it arrives, so anyone can tell which is older. Make "old in front" part of the job of whoever restocks, and check by reaching to the back of a shelf now and then. And don't let cartons be opened out of order because the newer one happens to be nearer. When "first in" isn't "first to expire" Sometimes a later delivery has an earlier expiry date than the stock you already hold. It happens when a supplier clears older batches. For anything with a date, the stronger rule is first to expire, first out. Read the date on every delivery and arrange by date, not by arrival. And check dates before accepting goods at all, as described in goods received note: format, sample, and how to check a delivery. Pharmacies work this way as a matter of course. See how to do stock-taking in a pharmacy. FIFO in your figures Now the arithmetic. Prices from suppliers keep moving, so identical tins on your shelf may have cost you different amounts. When you sell some, which cost do you use? FIFO says: assume the oldest ones were sold first. Here's an example with invented figures. You have 20 tins that you bought at ₦2,500 each. A new delivery brings 30 tins at ₦2,800 each. You now hold 50 tins that cost you: 20 × 2,500 = ₦50,000 30 × 2,800 = ₦84,000 Total ₦134,000 Over the next fortnight you sell 35 tins. Under FIFO, the first 20 sold are the old ones, and the next 15 come from the new batch. 20 × 2,500 = ₦50,000 15 × 2,800 = ₦42,000 Cost of the 35 tins sold = ₦92,000 What's left is 15 tins from the new batch: 15 × 2,800 = ₦42,000. That's your closing stock for this item. Check: ₦92,000 sold plus ₦42,000 remaining is ₦134,000, which is everything you paid. Why this matters when prices are rising Under FIFO, the stock left on your shelf is valued at the most recent prices, which is close to what it would cost to replace. That gives you an honest picture of what your stock is worth. It also has a catch. The cost charged against your sales is the older, lower cost, so your profit on paper looks a little better than it feels. You sold 20 tins that cost ₦2,500, but to put 20 back on the shelf you now need ₦2,800 each. That's ₦6,000 more to restock than those tins cost you. If your selling price was set on the old cost, part of your "profit" is already spoken for. This is why you should reprice the goods already on your shelf when a new, higher cost arrives, not only the new delivery. The reasoning is in markup vs margin: how to set a selling price. Using it in your records You don't need to track every tin. For a small shop: On each item's page in the stock record book, note the cost of each delivery beside the quantity received. When you value stock at month end, work backwards from the most recent delivery. If you hold 15 and the last delivery was 30, all 15 are at the latest cost. If you hold 40 and the last delivery was 30, then 30 are at the latest cost and 10 at the one before. Use the same method every month. Switching between methods makes your profit figures impossible to compare. That month-end value is your closing stock, and how it feeds into profit is covered in opening stock and closing stock. If you keep store-room cards, the same costing appears on the stock card. Do the shelf version first, though. Getting the oldest goods out of the door before they spoil will save a provision store more money than any costing method.

  • Goods received note: format, sample, and how to check a delivery

    A delivery is the moment your money turns into stock, and it's the moment most shops check least. The truck is blocking the road, the driver is in a hurry, customers are waiting, and someone signs the waybill without counting. Whatever was short, damaged or swapped in that delivery is now your loss, and your signature says you received it all. A goods received note is how you stop that. It's your own record, written by your own staff, of what actually arrived. What it is The supplier's invoice or waybill says what they claim to have sent. A goods received note, or GRN, says what you counted. They are often the same. When they aren't, the GRN is the one your stock records follow, and the difference is what you take up with the supplier. Use a numbered duplicate booklet, one note per delivery. The format Then a line for each item: And at the bottom: received and counted by (name and signature), and delivered by (the driver's name and signature). A sample Here's an example. The details are invented. GRN no. 0031. Date: 7 October 2026, 10:40am. Supplier: Sunrise Distributors. Invoice no. SD/4471. Delivered by: Mr Sule, vehicle LSD 000 XX. Received by: K. Adebayo (signed). Delivered by: Sule (signed). Four lines, three problems. A carton of milk never arrived. Six packs of spaghetti are unsellable. And there is an extra carton of detergent you didn't order, which you'll be billed for unless you say so. Without the note, all three would have surfaced weeks later as confusion. How to check a delivery Have your order beside you. Check against what you asked for, not only against the invoice. The invoice tells you what the supplier decided to send. Count everything before signing anything. Offload first, then count. Count cartons, and open a sample to confirm the number inside. Check what you're counting. Right brand, right size, right variant. A carton of 400g tins is not a carton of 900g tins. Look at the condition. Wet or crushed cartons, leaking kegs, dented tins, broken seals. Read the dates. For anything that expires, check the date before you accept it. A supplier clearing nearly expired stock is counting on you not looking. Write what you found. Fill in the Received column with your count, not with the invoice figure. Mark the supplier's copy too. Write any shortage or damage on their waybill before you sign it, and have the driver sign your note. "Received 9 cartons, 1 short" on both papers ends the argument before it starts. Report differences the same day, by call and by message, quoting the GRN and invoice numbers. If the driver won't wait for a count, sign with the words "received unchecked, subject to count" and count immediately. Then decide whether that's a supplier you want. Who should receive Whoever placed the order shouldn't be the only person who receives it. When one person orders, receives and records, a short delivery can be hidden completely, with or without the supplier's help. In a small shop, the simplest split is that the owner or manager orders and pays, and a named member of staff counts and signs the GRN. It's one of the controls described in how to stop staff stealing from your shop. After the delivery Post it to stock. Enter the Received quantity, not the invoiced one, on each item's page in your stock record book or on its bin card, quoting the GRN number. Staple the papers together. Your order, the supplier's invoice and your copy of the GRN make one set. File the sets by supplier. Pay for what you received. Before paying an invoice, check it against the GRN. Pay for 9 cartons of milk, not 10, and for the spaghetti less the spoiled packs, unless the supplier has replaced them. Update your costs. If the price on this invoice is higher than last time, your selling price needs another look. See markup vs margin. It adds ten minutes to each delivery. In return, every item in your shop can be traced back to the day it came in and the person who counted it.

  • 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 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 get a barcode for your products in Nigeria

    Before you pay anyone for barcodes, work out which of three situations you are in. Two of them don't need a registered barcode at all, and a lot of small businesses pay for one they didn't need. Do you actually need one? You run a shop and sell other companies' products. You don't need to buy barcodes. The tin of milk, the bottle of lotion and the pack of noodles already carry the manufacturer's barcode. If you use a scanner, you scan the code that's printed on the pack. You make or repackage goods and sell them only in your own shop. Think of goods such as rice you bag yourself, your own zobo, or loose items sold by weight. You can use internal codes. These are numbers you make up, print as barcode labels and stick on. They work perfectly inside your own shop and cost nothing to create. They mean nothing anywhere else. You make a product and want other retailers to stock it. Now you need a registered barcode. Supermarkets and distributors generally expect each product to carry a globally unique number, so that it can't clash with another supplier's product at their till. That number comes from GS1. Most of this guide is about the third case. What GS1 is GS1 is the international body behind the barcode numbers on retail products. Each country has a member organisation that issues numbers to local companies. In Nigeria, GS1 Nigeria publishes its registration process and fees at gs1ng.org. What you get from GS1 is not the black-and-white stripes. It is a set of numbers, called GTINs, registered to your company. The stripes are only a way of printing a number so that a scanner can read it. How registration works The details below are from GS1 Nigeria's barcode and membership pages as they stood on 6 October 2026. Fees and steps change, so confirm on its site before paying anything. Who can apply. GS1 Nigeria says only brand owners can apply for barcode numbers. If you sell under your own brand name, that's you. If someone else owns the brand, they apply. How many you need. Every variation of a product needs its own number. A drink in 35cl and 50cl bottles is two. The same biscuit in three flavours is three. A carton of twelve that is scanned as a carton is another one. Count carefully before you apply, because the fee depends on the band. Documents. GS1 Nigeria's membership FAQ lists a CAC certificate, a utility bill, its signed membership document and proof of payment. Process. On its website, choose to request a barcode, select manufacturer sign up, and complete the registration forms. GS1 Nigeria says registration usually takes two to three working days after the forms, documents and payment are in. Fees. The scale of fees listed on that date was: Note the renewal column. GS1 Nigeria says renewal is required for as long as its numbers are on your products. A barcode is a yearly cost, not a one-off purchase, so build it into the price of the product. About cheaper barcodes sold online You will find websites offering barcode numbers for a small one-time payment. Be careful. The reason to have a registered number is that a retailer can trust it belongs to your company and nobody else's. Before buying from anyone other than GS1 Nigeria, ask the supermarkets or distributors you hope to supply which numbers they accept. Their answer is the one that matters, and relabelling a whole production run is expensive. From number to label Once you have your numbers: Assign one number to each product variation and keep a list. Never reuse a number for a different product. Have the barcode image made from each number. Your packaging designer or printer can do this. Print it at a sensible size, in dark bars on a light, plain background, on a flat part of the pack. Barcodes over a seam, a curve or a busy pattern often fail to scan. Test before you print thousands. Scan a sample pack with an ordinary scanner or a phone app. Having a barcode doesn't get you onto a supermarket shelf. Retailers have their own requirements, which usually include NAFDAC registration for regulated products like food, drinks, cosmetics and medicines. Ask each retailer for their supplier requirements early. Internal barcodes for your own shop Back to the second case. If you only need to scan your own unbarcoded items at your own counter, you can create codes yourself. Give each item a short number of your own, for example 2001 for your 1kg bagged rice and 2002 for the 2kg. Use free barcode label software or a label printer to print them, and stick them on. Keep the list of which number is which product. A scanner isn't required to run a well-controlled shop, though. A stock record book and a daily sales record book do the same job for a small shop. Scanning becomes worth it when the queue at your counter is the thing slowing sales down.

  • How to keep stock records in Excel, with a sheet you can copy

    Most stock sheets people download are too clever. They have dashboards and macros, and they break the first time someone types in the wrong cell. A stock record that survives daily use in a shop is plain. It has three tabs and four formulas. It works the same in Excel and in Google Sheets. The idea Never type a balance. Type what happened, and let the sheet work out the balance. When people type balances by hand, one wrong subtraction stays wrong forever. When you record movements, in and out, the balance is always opening stock plus everything in, minus everything out. Tab 1: Items One row per product. Name the tab Items. Give every product a short code and never reuse one. "Opening qty" is what you counted on the day you started the sheet. Tab 2: Movements One row every time stock changes. Name the tab Movements. The Type column only ever says In or Out. A sale is Out. Damage is Out. A delivery is In. A customer return is In. Enter one Out line per item per day, taken from your daily sales record book. You don't need a row for every customer. You never delete or edit old rows on this tab. A mistake is corrected with a new line that says what it's correcting. Tab 3: Stock This is the tab you read. Name it Stock. Columns A to C repeat the code, item and unit from the Items tab. Then: In row 2, type these formulas, then copy them down the column. E2, total in: =SUMIFS(Movements!D:D, Movements!B:B, A2, Movements!C:C, "In") F2, total out: =SUMIFS(Movements!D:D, Movements!B:B, A2, Movements!C:C, "Out") G2, balance: =D2+E2-F2 I2, status: =IF(G2<=H2, "Reorder", "") J2, value: multiply the balance in G2 by the item's cost from the Items tab For D2 and H2, point at the matching cells on the Items tab, or copy the figures across once. With the sample rows above, tin milk shows Opening 48, In 24, Out 13, Balance 59. At the bottom of column J, add a total. That's the cost value of everything in your shop, a number most owners have never seen. Using it day to day Every evening, add the day's Out lines from the sales book. Every delivery, add In lines from your goods received note, using the quantity you counted. Every week, count your key items and compare with the Balance column. If the shelf has 57 and the sheet says 59, add a line: Out, 2, "Count adjustment", with the date. Don't touch the old rows. How to count is in how to take stock in a shop without closing for the day. Every morning, look down the Status column. Anything saying "Reorder" goes on today's order list. How to set the level is in reorder level formula. Protecting the sheet Lock the formula cells on the Stock tab so nobody types over them. Use a drop-down for the Type column so it only accepts In or Out. A typed "IN " with a space will not be counted. Use a drop-down for the code too, taken from the Items tab, so nobody enters a code that doesn't exist. Back it up. In Google Sheets this is automatic. In Excel, save to a cloud folder, not only to the shop laptop. One person enters each day. Their initials go in the By column. Where a spreadsheet runs out A sheet like this is a real step up from a notebook, and for one shop with a few hundred items it can serve for years. It does have limits, and it's better to know them now. It's always behind. The balance is only right as of the last time someone typed in the sales. During the day it's a guess. It trusts whoever is typing. Anyone with the file can change a number, and nothing shows who did or when. It's awkward on a phone, which is where most shop owners actually are. Two branches means two files, and nobody will keep them in step. It grows slow. After a year of daily rows, the Movements tab is long and the formulas start to drag. When those start to bite, you've outgrown it. That's the kind of shop we are building Tabs for. It hasn't launched yet. The good news is that nothing here is wasted: a clean Items tab, with codes, costs and prices, is exactly what any stock system will ask you for on the first day.

  • 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 manage two shops without losing track

    The first shop taught you everything by standing in it. You know which customers pay late, which shelf empties first, and roughly what a good Tuesday looks like. Then you open a second branch, and discover that none of that knowledge travelled with you. A second shop isn't the first shop again. It's the first shop without you in it. Whatever you were doing by presence now has to be done by record. Make both shops keep the same records Before the second shop opens, settle the paperwork in the first one. If the original shop runs on your memory, the new one will run on your manager's memory, and you'll have no way to compare them. Both shops should keep the same three things, ruled the same way: a daily sales record book, closed and signed each evening a stock record book for at least the top 30 to 50 items a deliveries file holding every supplier invoice, signed by whoever checked the goods in Same columns, same closing routine, same evening report to you. When the formats match, you can lay the two side by side and differences jump out. Stock that moves between the shops This is the new problem a second branch creates, and it's where most two-shop owners lose control. It starts innocently. Branch B runs out of a popular cream, Branch A has plenty, so somebody carries two cartons across. Nobody writes anything down. A week later Branch A's count is two cartons short, Branch B's has two cartons it can't explain, and you have an argument where you should have a record. The fix is a transfer note for every movement, however small. Use a duplicate booklet. The top copy travels with the goods. The duplicate stays at the sending shop. The sending shop writes the items out of its stock pages, and the receiving shop writes them in, each quoting the transfer number. The rule that makes it work: what left A must equal what arrived at B. If the receiver counts 23 where the note says 24, they write 23 and sign, and you find out that day. One price list Customers talk, and many will visit both shops. If the same item costs ₦4,500 in one and ₦4,800 in the other, they'll assume the higher one is somebody's private addition. Keep a single written price list, issued by you, dated, and posted in both shops. When a price changes, both shops get the new list on the same day. If you really do need different prices, for example because one location has higher rent or a different kind of customer, make it a decision you wrote down, not something that crept in. Buying Buy centrally if you can. One person placing orders for both shops gets better prices on bigger quantities and stops each branch from stocking by its own taste. Have goods delivered to each shop directly where the supplier allows it, and checked in by that shop's staff against the invoice. If everything arrives at one shop first, every onward movement needs a transfer note. Either way, keep paying suppliers yourself. Branches receive. You pay. The manager A second shop means somebody else is in charge of a room full of your money. Choose that person for their record-keeping as much as their selling. A brilliant salesperson who "will do the book later" will sink a branch you can't see. With staff moving between two shops, write one duty roster for both on the same page. It's the simplest way to stop the same person being expected in two places on one morning. Be clear about what they can decide alone: discounts up to a limit, which customers get credit and how much, when to call you. Put it in writing, along with the rest of the terms. What belongs in that document is in sales girl agreement and guarantor form. Then check the branch the way you would want to be checked. Arrive without notice once or twice a month and count 20 items against the stock book. Compare the shops every week With matching records, five numbers a week tell you most of what you need. Don't expect the two to match. A shop near a market and a shop in an estate will sell differently. What you are watching is each shop against its own past weeks, and anything that moves in one without a reason you know. The honest limit of paper Two shops on notebooks is workable. It is also the point where the system starts to creak. Transfer notes get lost, the stock pages run a few days behind, and comparing branches means an evening with a calculator. That is the situation we're building Tabs for: stock for every store in one place, transfers recorded at both ends, and each action logged to the person who did it. It hasn't launched yet. Until it does, the transfer note and the matching books will carry you a long way, and they are the same habits any system will depend on later.

  • 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 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 card and bin card: samples, and the difference between them

    These two get confused because they look almost the same and record the same goods. The difference is where each one is kept, who writes on it, and whether it shows money. The short version A bin card stays with the goods. It hangs on the shelf or sits in the bin, and records quantities only: what came in, what went out, what's left. The storekeeper fills it in at the moment goods move. A stock card, also called a stores ledger card, is kept in the office or with the accounts. It records the same movements, with the cost and value as well. Whoever keeps the books fills it in from the paperwork. Because they're kept by different people from different sources, each checks the other. If the bin card says 40 and the stock card says 46, something was issued without paperwork, or the paperwork wasn't posted. A bin card, filled in The figures are examples. Item: Vegetable oil, 5 litre keg. Location: Store room, rack 2. Unit: keg. Minimum level: 10. On 6 October the balance dropped to 8, below the minimum of 10. That's the signal to reorder, and the delivery came the next day. Notice there is no money anywhere on the card. A storekeeper doesn't need to know what the oil cost in order to count kegs. A stock card for the same item The new delivery cost more: ₦12,000 a keg against ₦11,500 for the old stock. So after 7 October the store holds 8 kegs at the old cost (₦92,000) and 24 at the new (₦288,000), which is ₦380,000 in all. On 10 October, six kegs go out. Under first in, first out, they come from the old stock, so they are priced at ₦11,500: ₦69,000 in total. That leaves ₦311,000. Price that same issue at the new cost by mistake and you'd show ₦308,000, a ₦3,000 error from a single line. This is why a stock card needs one costing method, used every time. The method here is explained in first in, first out: how FIFO works in a provision store. Which one do you need? A small shop where everything is on the shelves. You don't need both. One page per item with a running balance does the work of the two together. That's the stock record book, and it's where most shops should start. A shop with a separate store room. Put a bin card on each rack in the store room. Goods leave the store only when someone writes the line. Keep your stock record book for the shop as a whole. Now the store room and the shop floor can each be counted and checked. A wholesaler or distributor with a warehouse. Use both in full. A storekeeper who keeps the bin cards and a different person who keeps the stock cards is a basic control, because no single person can make goods vanish from both records. A pharmacy. Bin cards are common here, often with batch number and expiry date added as extra columns, since two packs of the same medicine can expire a year apart. See how to do stock-taking in a pharmacy. Rules that keep the cards honest Write the line when the goods move, not at the end of the day. Every receipt quotes a goods received note number. Every issue quotes who took it and where it went. Use pen. Correct mistakes with a single line and initials. Count the bin against its card regularly, and write the count on the card. Don't let the person who orders goods be the only one who records their arrival. A card that's a week behind is worse than no card, because people trust it.

  • 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.

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  • 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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