Your newest attendant is at the till. A customer asks for a better price on a ₦45,000 blender, and the attendant opens the stock sheet to check how low she can go. The sheet shows what you paid, ₦31,000, and what the shop makes on it. Now she knows your margin. Next week she also knows it for every item on the shelf.
Nothing bad has happened yet. But you did not decide she should know that. It happened because nobody decided anything, and everyone in the shop got the same access as the person who started first.
Access in a shop is a decision about jobs, not about people. You can make it on paper, in a notebook, or in any software. The method is the same.
Start with the jobs, not the names
Write down every job that exists in your shop. Not the people, the jobs. In most shops there are four:
- The attendant at the till, who serves customers and takes money.
- The store keeper, who receives goods, shelves them and counts.
- The manager or senior attendant, who runs the floor when you are away.
- You, the owner.
A small shop may have one person doing two jobs. That is fine. Write both jobs down and give that person the access of both. It becomes obvious that a person in two jobs holds more than the others, and that is worth knowing.
Now, under each job, make two lists. What does this person need to see? What does this person need to do? Be stingy. Add something only if the person cannot do the job without it.
Most owners go the other way. They begin with everything and take away what worries them. You will miss things that way. Beginning with nothing and adding what the job needs is slower on the first day and safer for the next five years.
What you paid for stock
Cost prices are the first thing most owners think about, and the question is fair: should your sales staff see what you paid?
Start with what an attendant actually needs. She needs the selling price, and she needs to know how far she is allowed to move it. She does not need to know that the blender cost ₦31,000. That number helps a customer bargaining at the till only if she says it out loud, and it helps a person who plans to open a rival shop.
Be fair to her, though. Hiding the cost is not an accusation. Most attendants who see a margin do nothing with it. But they are human, and a number like that gets repeated to a friend, a customer or a cousin. If it is not in front of her, it cannot leave through her.
The store keeper is different. When goods arrive, he checks them against the supplier's invoice, and that invoice carries the cost. A store keeper who cannot see what an item should cost cannot notice that a supplier has charged you ₦38,000 for something you agreed at ₦31,000. Give him the cost price, and treat it as part of his job, not a favour.
Profit and margin are a step further out. The attendant and the store keeper rarely need your overall profit. The manager may need it if you ask him to set prices. Otherwise it stays with you, or with whoever does your books.
Products, discounts and refunds
Then there is the question of who may add products. "Should my sales staff be allowed to add new products?" has two honest answers, and the right one depends on how your shop gets new goods.
If a supplier delivers and your store keeper receives, then he adds the product, and the attendant does not need to. An attendant who adds a product at the till is making a stock record in the middle of a sale. That is how you end up with "Indomie" and "Indomie chicken" and "indomie 70g" as three lines, with one count split across them.
If your attendants often meet items that are not in the book, say a customer asks for something you sell but never listed, then letting them add the product is practical, as long as someone checks the new lines at the end of the day.
Editing is a bigger decision than adding. Changing a price or a quantity on an existing item moves money. Give the right to edit to as few people as the shop can run on. Deleting is bigger still. A line crossed out of a notebook is a line nobody can check later. Keep deleting for yourself.
A discount is a price cut that you agreed to in advance, and a refund is money leaving the till. Treat both with care, because both are where honest mistakes and dishonest ones look identical.
Decide a limit for each job. The attendant may give up to 5%. The manager may give up to 10%. Anything larger waits for you. Write the limit on a card by the till, so nobody has to guess and nobody gets embarrassed.
Refunds work the same way, with one more rule. Whoever takes the item back should not be the only person who decides the refund. A return where the attendant takes the goods, opens the till and hands over cash is three steps done by one pair of hands. Split them: the attendant records the return, the manager approves it, and the money moves after that.
The thing most owners miss
Here is the lesson that catches shops out, whatever system they use. Being allowed to do something is useless if you cannot see the place where it happens.
Say you let your manager take returns. A customer comes back with a faulty kettle, and the manager needs to find the original sale to confirm it was bought here, at that price, on that day. But you have only given him access to today's sales. Last Tuesday's sale is not on his screen, or not in the book he is allowed to open. So he either sends the customer away, or phones you, or gives the refund without checking. All three are worse than what you wanted.
The same thing happens in the other direction. You let an attendant see the day's sales so she can answer customers, but you do not let her take payments. She can read the receipt and cannot close it.
So do not set access by ticking boxes against a list of words. Walk through the job instead. Take one working day of the attendant, from opening to closing, and follow every move: opens the shop, serves a customer, takes payment, gives change, handles a return, counts her takings at closing. At each step ask two questions. What does she have to do here, and what does she have to look at to do it? Whatever the answers are, they are her access.
A worked example
Here is the walk-through done for a shop with an attendant, a store keeper and a manager. Treat it as a starting point and change it to fit your goods.
| Job | Cost prices | Add or edit products | Discounts | Returns and refunds | Day's takings | Cash and keys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attendant | No | No | Up to 5% | Records the return, can't approve | Her own sales only | Her own till float; no shop keys |
| Store keeper | Yes, to check invoices | Adds and edits; no deleting | No | No | No | Store room key; no cash |
| Manager | Yes | Adds and edits; no deleting | Up to 10% | Approves | The whole shop's sales | Counts cash at closing; one set of keys |
| Owner | Yes | Everything, including deleting | Any | Any | Everything, including profit | Safe and the spare keys |
Look at the last column. Cash and keys are the oldest part of shop access, and they still matter most. One set of keys held by one person means one person to ask when the store room is short. Three people with a copy means three suspects, and an argument you cannot settle.
That is the part owners do not say to their staff, and they should. Limiting access protects the people who work for you. When money goes missing from a shop where everyone can open everything, everyone is under suspicion, the honest ones included. When access is narrow and written down, the question "who could have done this?" has a short answer, and the rest are cleared at once. Tell your staff that when you set this up. It lands better than an announcement that you are taking things away.
If you use Tabs, which is our software, the same method fits how roles work there. Everyone gets their own login, and each person holds a role that decides what they can see and change. Tabs comes with an Owner role and a Staff role. Staff can sell and give discounts, add and edit products, and see cost prices, because editing a product shows its cost. Staff cannot delete products and cannot see sales figures or margins. For anything more specific you can make your own role, starting from Cashier, Stock keeper, Store manager or Accountant, and set each area to No access, View or Manage.
It also deals with the missing-page problem for you. When you tick a permission, Tabs ticks the ones it needs to work, marked "Included with". An action brings the View permission of the page it lives on, so a role cannot create orders without seeing them. Costs work the same way: they show only to a role that can see them. Details are in members and roles.
Access is not a one-time job. When an attendant becomes a manager, her access should change on the same day, not six months later after someone notices. When someone leaves, their access ends that day, whether it is a login, a key or the code to the safe.
Once a quarter, take your table out and check it against what people actually do. If the store keeper never looks at costs, take it away. If the manager keeps phoning you for something, that is access he needs and doesn't have.
For the wider set of controls that sit around access, read how to stop staff stealing from your shop. For what to put in the job description itself, see sales girl duties and responsibilities. And if the point of all this is to leave the shop in other hands, how to run your shop when you're not there carries on from here.
