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Scalability.

Discusses how inventory systems help businesses grow, manage stock efficiently, and scale operations.

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How to become a distributor in Nigeria

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

By Tabs Team · Oct 6, 2026

  • 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.

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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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