Supermarket software for shops with thousands of lines

Thin margins punish anything you can't see

When you keep 300 shillings on a 4,800 shilling bag of sugar, sixteen bags must leave the shop legitimately to pay for one that walked out of it. A fat-margin trade absorbs that. A supermarket cannot.

The trouble is scale. Two thousand lines, four people serving, deliveries arriving while customers are still queuing — and a monthly stock count only tells you the loss happened, not where or when.

PesaScope keeps a running count per line instead. Every sale takes stock down, every delivery puts it back up at the cost you actually paid, and anything that leaves without a sale has to be written off by a named person, with a reason and a date.

A trading day, front to back

1. Everyone serving has their own loginEach sale carries the name of whoever recorded it, so a shortfall points at one counter, not the whole shop.
2. Deliveries go in at the price you paidRecord the cost per unit on each load. Sugar at 4,450 this week and 4,600 next gives you a real margin.
3. Write off what spoils, the same dayDamaged, Expired, Stolen, Transfer or Correction. Each adjustment is logged with your name and the date, and that log is your only honest record of shrinkage.
4. Set a low-stock level on the fast moversSugar, oil, flour and bread carry a threshold. They turn red on the stock list before the shelf is bare, not after.

Building a two-thousand line catalogue

Pick "Supermarket / mini-market" at sign-up and this list is already there — and add the rest as deliveries come in. Group them into Dry goods, Fresh, Household and Drinks, and the reports follow.

There is no cap on the catalogue. A new line takes a name, a category, a cost price and a selling price.

A week on two ordinary lines

The two lines earned 319,800 between them. Spoilage and nine missing bags took 136,050 of that — nearly half. No price change would recover as much as simply knowing it.

What PesaScope does not do at the till

It does not need a barcode scanner. You find a product by typing part of its name, which is quicker than it sounds and does not stop when a scanner dies on a Saturday.

It also does not count your cash drawer. There is no shift cash-up telling you the float was 12,000 short. What you get is the other half of that sum — exactly what was recorded, by whom, at which branch — to compare against the money in the drawer.

If you run more than one shop, each branch holds its own stock and takings, which is the fastest way to spot a line haemorrhaging in one place and fine everywhere else.

Where a supermarket quietly leaks

1. Stock bought at a price nobody recordedA stale cost price makes every margin built on it wrong.
2. Spoilage written off as "just how it is"Two per cent or nine? Only a dated write-off log can tell you.
3. Credit given at the counter and forgottenRecord what was actually paid and the balance becomes a dated debt.
4. Slow lines eating the shelf and the capitalMoney sitting on a shelf for four months is money not buying sugar.

The detail, if you want it

Questions supermarket owners ask