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Discusses fraud prevention, role-based access control, and inventory safety measures.

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Handing over note for a shop: format and samples

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

By Tabs Team · Oct 8, 2026

  • Shop opening and closing checklist you can copy

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

  • Daily sales record book format, with a sample page

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

  • Petty cash book format for a small shop

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

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

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

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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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