Write down every sale. Here’s a page that makes it easy.

Why bother

“We’re managing” is what everybody says when they don’t know. A daily sales record is how you find out. Not for the tax office, and not for a bank, though both may ask one day. For you: which days are good, which dishes carry the business, and whether the money that should be there is.

It doesn’t need to be clever. It needs to be the same every day, and it needs to be finished every night.

The sheet

The sheet above prints on one page. It has room for the date, your business’s name and the float you started with, then a line for each sale:

Column	What goes in it
Time	When the sale happened, roughly. It helps you find it again.
What sold	“2 waakye, 1 sobolo”. Enough to recognise it.
Cash ₵	The amount, if they paid cash.
MoMo ₵	The amount, if they paid by MoMo.
Owes ₵	The amount, if it went on credit. Put the name in “What sold”.
Who	Who served it, if more than one person takes money.

One sale, one line, one amount in one column. If somebody pays part cash and part MoMo, split it across the two columns on the same line.

The five minutes at closing

The record only pays for itself at the end of the day. Five minutes:

1. Add up each column. Cash, MoMo, owes. Write the totals at the bottom.
2. Count the drawer. Take away the float you started with. What’s left should match the cash total. Counting the drawer has a sheet that adds it up note by note.
3. Check the MoMo. Look at what actually arrived in the wallet today, on your own phone. It should match the MoMo total, less the charges. Who pays the MoMo charge explains the difference you should expect.
4. Carry the credit. Copy anything still owed into your credit book, under each person’s name, so it isn’t lost when the page is.
5. Write the difference. Short or over, in cash and in MoMo. Even when it’s zero. Especially when it’s zero.

The mistakes that make a record useless

• Writing it up later. A record filled in from memory at night is a guess with a date on it. One line, as the sale happens.
• Mixing cash and MoMo. The two are checked in different places. Mixed, a shortfall in one hides in the other.
• Skipping the small sales. Pure water and sachets add up, and they’re exactly what goes unrecorded.
• Not writing the difference. A record that never compares with the drawer is a diary, not a check.
• Leaving credit on the daily page. Tomorrow’s page won’t remember it. Move it to the credit book every night. Selling on credit goes through keeping one.

Once a week

Put the week’s totals side by side. Which day was best? Is Monday always quiet? Does the drawer come up short on the same day each week? That last one is worth a conversation, calmly, with the numbers in front of you. When the drawer is short has more.

When paper stops being enough

A notebook is a real system, and plenty of good businesses run on one. It starts to cost you when the queue is long enough that lines get skipped, when more than one person takes money, or when you want to know how the day’s going without being there. Notebook or app is our honest look at when to switch.

A till app writes the record for you as you sell. In Tabworthy, the report is this sheet, already added up, with cash, MoMo and credit apart, and readable from your own phone wherever you are.