Many shopkeepers know their daily sales but not their monthly profit. Money slips away in small expenses, credit that never comes back, expired products or stock-outs that send customers elsewhere. The good news: a few simple habits are enough to take back control. And to apply them without a notebook or calculator, we have prepared three free Excel tools that do the maths for you.
1. Keep the shop’s money and the household’s money apart
This is rule number one. When you take money from the till for school fees or groceries without writing it down, it becomes impossible to know whether the shop is making money. You have every right to pay yourself: simply record it as an “Out” under “Personal withdrawal”. At the end of the month, you will know what the business really earned, and what you took out of it.
2. Record every transaction the same day
A sale, a stock purchase, a taxi, an electricity bill: everything that goes in or out of the till is recorded, the same day. With the cash book, one line is enough: the date, what it is, the amount received or paid and the payment method (cash, MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money). The balance updates itself. Two minutes a day is the price of clear accounts.
3. Count the till every evening
In the evening, count the cash and compare it with what the till should hold. In the Daily cash book tool, just enter the amount counted: the difference appears immediately. A small gap now and then is a change mistake. A gap that keeps coming back is a warning: a forgotten sale, an unrecorded expense, or someone helping themselves.
4. Track your stock so you stop losing sales
A customer who leaves without their product goes to the shop next door, and may not come back. For each product, set an alert level: the quantity below which you must reorder. The Stock management tool flags the product as “Reorder”, then “Out of stock”, and calculates your stock value and your margin on every sale. You will also spot the products sleeping on the shelves and tying up your cash.
5. Manage customer credit strictly
Offering credit builds loyalty, but poorly tracked credit quickly turns into a loss. Three rules:
- a limit for each customer, which you don’t exceed;
- a due date for every purchase on credit;
- a polite reminder as soon as the due date has passed.
The customer credit book calculates each customer’s balance, flags overdue accounts and prepares a courteous WhatsApp message with the amount due: one click on “Remind” and the message is ready to send.
6. Look at your figures once a month
Take an hour at the start of each month to open the dashboards: what came in, what went out, each month’s result, the expenses that are rising, the best-selling products. That is where good decisions are made: renegotiating a purchase price, dropping a product that doesn’t sell, promoting the one that pays.
7. Always back up
A stolen phone or a broken computer must not take your accounts with it. Once a week, email the file to yourself, copy it to a USB stick or save it in the cloud (Google Drive, OneDrive).
Three free tools to start today
Our tools work with Excel, but also with the free Excel mobile app, Google Sheets, LibreOffice and WPS Office. They contain no macros: nothing to enable, no security warnings. Fill in the white cells, everything else is calculated for you.
- Daily cash book: income, expenses, balance, cash check and monthly results;
- Stock management: products, stock in and out, alerts, stock value and margins;
- Customer credit book: balances, overdue accounts, largest balances and WhatsApp reminders.
👉 Download the free Excel tools
Want to go further? Our Excel Pro course teaches you to build your own spreadsheets. And when a spreadsheet is no longer enough (several shops, several sellers, built-in Mobile Money payments), we design the management software that fits you.