A notebook is a system too. Here’s when it stops being enough.

What the notebook gets right

Let’s be fair to it. A notebook:

• costs almost nothing and never needs charging;
• works in the dark and with no network, as long as you can read it;
• can’t be hacked and doesn’t need an update;
• is fast for one person with a short menu who knows every price;
• is yours. Nobody can switch it off.

If you’re one person, selling a few things, on a steady day, a notebook filled in properly is a real record. The daily sales record is our sheet for doing it well.

Where it starts to cost you

The notebook doesn’t fail all at once. It leaks, in the same places, as a business gets busier:

• The rush. Nobody can write while carrying three bowls. The lines that get skipped are the ones you needed.
• More than one person. Two people, one book, and nobody knows whose sale was whose. When the drawer is short, everybody is a suspect.
• MoMo. A notebook records “paid MoMo”. It can’t tell you whether the money arrived.
• Credit. Names in the back of the book, crossed out, rewritten. One person can read it. Nobody can prove what was paid.
• Adding up. The totals are only as good as the sum done at eleven at night, if it’s done.
• Being somewhere else. You can’t read the notebook from a wedding in Kumasi.

If two or three of these sound familiar, the notebook is costing you more than an app would.

What an app does differently

An app doesn’t make you more organised. It makes the record a side effect of selling:

• every sale is written the moment you tap it, with the time and who served it;
• cash and MoMo are kept apart by themselves, and a MoMo prompt closes the sale only when the money has arrived;
• credit sits under each customer’s name, with every item and price;
• the day adds itself up, and you can read it on your own phone from anywhere.

It has its own costs: a phone that needs charging, a few minutes to learn it, and trusting your records to something you didn’t write by hand. Tabworthy keeps working without a network and saves every sale on the phone first, so dumsor doesn’t return you to paper. Selling offline explains how.

	Notebook	App
Cost to start	A pen and a book	Free plan on the phone you have
Works with no light or network	Yes, if you can read it	Yes, sales save on the phone
Knows if MoMo arrived	No	With a prompt, yes
Tells staff apart	No	On Pro, a PIN each
Adds up the day	You do	It does
Readable from elsewhere	No	Yes
Can be lost	Yes, and it’s gone	The phone can; the records sync

Moving without throwing the book away

You don’t have to copy the old notebook line by line. Start the app on a Monday and let the book stop on Sunday. For days that were only on paper, an owner or manager can enter that day’s takings in Tabworthy afterwards, one figure for each way you were paid, marked as takings from paper, so the week still adds up. Keep the old books; they’re your history.

Keep the notebook by the till for the first week too. When the queue gets long and you’re not sure yet, write it down and put it in later. That’s what the report’s takings from paper is for.

An honest answer

If you’re one person, the notebook is filled in every night, and the numbers add up, keep it. If you’re not sure the numbers add up, that’s your answer too.