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Your shop is busy. Customers come in, you sell, you restock, you sell again. Revenue looks fine. But at the end of the month, the money in your account doesn’t match what you expected.
Most shop owners assume the problem is slow sales. Usually it’s not. The money is leaving through gaps you haven’t noticed yet.
1. Stock that disappears between counts
You bought 10 litres of argan oil last month. Your records say you’ve sold 7 litres. But there’s only 2 litres on the shelf. A full litre is just gone.
Maybe it spilled during decanting. Maybe someone sold it and forgot to write it down. Maybe it walked out the door. You won’t know, because you only discover the gap during your next manual count, weeks later. By then, good luck figuring out what happened.
If stock deductions happen automatically with each sale, that missing litre shows up the same day, not three weeks from now during a panicked stocktake.
Record every stock movement as it happens. Sales, adjustments, breakages, all of it. The longer the delay between a loss and noticing it, the harder it is to fix.
2. Expired products hiding at the back of the shelf
You bought three batches of carrier oil over six months. The oldest batch sits behind the newer ones. You keep selling from the front because it’s right there. Why reach to the back?
Three months later, you pull out that first batch and discover it expired two weeks ago. NGN45,000 of product, straight to the bin. Money you already paid your supplier that you’ll never see again.
This happens constantly with oils, butters, actives, even packaged food. Anything with a shelf life. And most shop owners only find out when the product already smells off or the date on the label is long past.
The simple rule: always sell your oldest stock first. And get alerts when a batch is 30 or 60 days from expiry, so you can move it while it still has value. This matters most for pharmacies and cosmetics businesses where shelf life is part of the business model.
3. Profit you can’t actually calculate
You sold NGN800,000 this month. Expenses came to NGN500,000. So you made NGN300,000? Maybe. Maybe not.
If you bought shea butter at NGN3,500/kg in January and NGN4,200/kg in March, your profit on each kilo sold depends on which bag it came from. When you average the cost across all your stock, you lose the ability to tell which products are making money and which ones are quietly eating into your margin.
A product might look profitable on paper while the batch you’re actually selling was the expensive one. You won’t know until the cheap batch runs out and the numbers stop adding up.
Track cost per batch, not per product. Your profit on any sale should reflect what that specific stock actually cost you to buy, not a blended average.
4. Customer debts you’ve stopped tracking
A regular customer picks up NGN35,000 of product and says she’ll pay Friday. Friday comes and goes. Next week, she’s back, buys more on credit. You write it in the notebook somewhere, but the previous entry is a few pages back and you can’t remember the exact figure.
A few months of this and you’re owed NGN200,000 across a dozen customers. You’re not sure who owes what. Some debts are 90 days old. A couple will never be paid at all, but you haven’t written them off either, so they sit there, looking like money you have when you don’t.
Every credit sale needs a due date attached to it. And you need to see how old each debt is: 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. When you can see the aging clearly, you follow up before the money goes cold.
5. Selling small units at a loss without realising
You buy coconut oil in 5-litre jerrycans at NGN18,000. You decant it into 100ml bottles and sell each one at NGN700. That looks like a solid margin, NGN700 for NGN360 worth of oil.
But the bottle itself costs NGN80. The label, NGN30. You spill 5-10% during pouring. It takes you (or your staff) time to measure, fill, and cap each bottle. When you add all of that up, the real cost per 100ml is closer to NGN510. Your margin is 37%, not the 94% you thought.
Now multiply that across every small unit you sell. NGN50 lost here, NGN80 lost there, dozens of times a day. Over a month, it’s real money.
Your retail price for small units needs to be meaningfully higher per gram or per ml than your wholesale price. If it’s just a straight division of the big-unit price, you’re probably losing on every small sale. We wrote a full breakdown of how to price products for retail, wholesale, and bulk buyers.
Where the money actually goes
None of these feel like emergencies on any given Tuesday. A litre of missing oil. An expired batch. A customer who’ll pay “soon.” But stack them up across a full year and they cost hundreds of thousands of Naira.
The common thread: you can’t manage what you can’t see. When stock, costs, debts, and expiry dates live in your head or in scattered notebooks, stuff falls through.
Mayloo was built to close these gaps. Stock updates with every sale. Expiry alerts before you lose product. Profit against actual batch costs, not averages. Customer balances in one place. All on your phone.