Retail shop software for thin margins and fast turnover

The box is full and you are still short

Sugar bought at 4,700 and sold at 5,000 keeps three hundred shillings. That three hundred also has to cover the soap that walked, the crate that arrived two bottles short and the packet that sat until the date passed. A duka doesn't lose money in lumps; it loses it in coins, all day.

The cash box hides that, because it holds four kinds of money at once: today's takings, tomorrow's restocking float, the note you took out for lunch, and a neighbour's part payment. At week end the box is one number, and one number cannot say which of two hundred lines is earning.

PesaScope pulls them apart. Every product carries what you paid and what you charge, so margin becomes a figure rather than a feeling, and money that leaves the box for anything other than stock is recorded as what it was.

A trading day, written down as it happens

1. Ring up the salePick the items and quantities. Stock drops as you save, so the shelf and the book agree without a Sunday stocktake to reconcile them.
2. Split cash and Mobile MoneyRecord both parts against the same sale. The box and the MoMo line reconcile separately, which is how a shortfall gets caught the same day.
3. Give credit to a name, not a pageEnter what the neighbour actually paid and leave the rest on their record. It carries a date, so "since when?" finally has an answer.
4. Book the restock at the price you paidEnter the new cost with each delivery. When a supplier's price moves, your margin follows the real number instead of one from two months ago.

Your shelves, mostly there already

Pick "Retail shop" at sign-up and a short starter list is waiting — sugar, rice, cooking oil, soap and soda, grouped into Groceries, Household and Drinks. The rest of the shelves you add yourself, an evening's work for a typical duka.

Name things the way you say them out loud. You will pick off this list a hundred times a day, and a name you recognise beats a code you have to remember.

Six days of a small duka

The margin is not the problem. Clearing 380,000 on 2,940,000 of trade is ordinary for a duka. What eats it is the three lines nobody writes down, and the largest of them is money you took out of your own box.

No scanner, and mostly no need for one

PesaScope does not do barcode scanning. For a shop of a couple of hundred lines that costs less than it sounds: you pick items off a list on the phone, and a well-named list beats hunting for a barcode on a crumpled sachet.

It does mean the list has to be yours and has to stay tight. Start with the forty lines that make most of your money. Small things sold by the handful can share one line — "Sweets" at a single price is a perfectly good product.

The main app also needs a connection. If you want a till that keeps selling through a network drop, that is the separate POS app: it saves sales on the device and syncs them into your books later.

Where a duka's money leaks

1. Expiry nobody wrote offStock lost to damage, theft or a passed date needs an adjustment with a reason. Skip it and the count says you own goods that are in the bin.
2. Prices that driftedThe supplier raised cooking oil by 400 and the shelf price never moved. A cost price kept current is what makes that show up before the month closes.
3. Credit with no date on itA name in a notebook is a debt with no age. On a customer record you can see who has held your money six weeks instead of six days.
4. The float and the takings mixedRestocking money spent as personal cash is the classic way a profitable shop runs out of stock. Record what leaves the box and the two stop being one pile.

The detail, if you want it

Questions shop owners ask