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Quick question. How much is all the stock in your shop worth right now?
Not a rough guess. The actual Naira figure. Add up every drum of coconut oil, every carton of bottles, every jar of shea butter, every piece of equipment sitting on your shelves or in your store room. What’s the total?
If you sell cosmetics ingredients, that number could easily be north of NGN2 million. And most suppliers have no idea what it is on any given day. You’d need a full stocktake, a calculator, and half a Saturday to figure it out. By the time you’re done counting, someone’s already bought something, so your number is stale before you even write it down.
Joya Supplies decided to fix that.
Who Joya Supplies is
Joya Supplies is a cosmetics ingredients and equipment supplier based in Nigeria. They sell premium-grade raw materials such as the oils, butters, actives, and tools that cosmetics formulators and skincare makers need to build their products. If you’re in the beauty business, they’re the kind of supplier you order from. You can find them on Instagram @joyasupplies.
Running a supply business like this means managing a lot of moving parts. You might carry 200+ products. Each one has a cost price from your supplier, a selling price for your customers, and a quantity that shifts every time you buy or sell. Some items come in bulk, 5-litre jerrycans, 25kg bags, and leave in smaller units. New shipments arrive every week. Orders go out every day.
When all of that lives in a notebook or a spreadsheet you update when you remember, things drift. You skip an entry when the shop is busy. A sale happens and nobody writes it down. By month end, the figure in your records and what’s actually on the shelf are two different numbers. And you can’t tell which one is wrong.
What Joya Supplies said about Mayloo
The founder of Joya Supplies has been using Mayloo and sent us this on WhatsApp:
“I’m still using it. Using it to update my inventory. It’s been great so far. I can’t wait to be done so I can start generating sales invoice but I’m glad I can see my inventory value in real time.”
That short message touches on three features worth unpacking.
Cataloguing and updating inventory
The first thing Joya Supplies did was load their products into Mayloo such as ingredients, equipment, quantities, cost prices. That groundwork matters. Once your stock is in the system, every movement gets tracked as it happens. A new purchase from a supplier, a sale to a customer, an adjustment for a broken bottle. The numbers update on the spot.
Compare that to the notebook approach where you record things later if you remember. If your staff member sold five bottles of argan oil during the lunch rush and forgot to write it down, you won’t notice until your next physical count. Could be weeks. And by then, good luck figuring out where the gap came from.
We wrote about this pattern in 5 ways Nigerian shop owners lose money. Stock that disappears between counts is money you’ve already spent that you’ll never recover. When movements are recorded as they happen, a discrepancy shows up the same day, not three weeks later during a panicked stocktake.
Seeing inventory value in real time
This is the one that clearly excites Joya Supplies. And it makes sense when you think about what a cosmetics supplier actually has on their shelves.
Every product has a cost price and a quantity on hand. Mayloo takes those numbers across your whole catalogue and gives you one figure: the total value of your stock right now. Your position updates with every transaction, no manual counting, no spreadsheet formulas, no waiting for month-end.
Why does that number matter so much? Because a cosmetics supplier might have NGN3.5 million of cash sitting on shelves in the form of ingredients and equipment. That’s capital. You need to know if that number is going up because business is growing, or because stock is piling up and not selling. You need to know if you can afford to place another order with your supplier this week, or if too much of your cash is already locked up in inventory.
Without that number, you’re making those calls on gut feeling. Suppliers who can see their inventory value make purchasing decisions with their eyes open. They know when to reorder. They spot slow-moving products before they become dead stock. They can answer “how is business?” with a number, not a shrug.
Sales invoices, next on the list
Joya Supplies also mentioned that they can’t wait to start generating sales invoices once they’re done cataloguing their stock. That sequencing is smart. Your invoices are only as good as the data behind them. If the quantities in the system don’t match what’s on the shelf, the invoice doesn’t mean much.
Get the inventory right first. Then when you start selling through the system, each invoice pulls from accurate stock, the quantities deduct automatically, and you have a paper trail that actually holds up.
For a B2B supplier, this part is not optional. Salon owners, cosmetics manufacturers, beauty retailers — they all need proper invoices for their own bookkeeping. A WhatsApp message saying “you owe me NGN85,000” won’t satisfy anyone’s accountant.
The shift from notebooks to real numbers
What Joya Supplies is doing follows a pattern we see often. A business owner knows their current system — the notebook, the spreadsheet, the mental math is holding them back. They start by getting their products into a proper system. Then they start selling from it. Then the reports, the invoices, and the accounting all fall into place because the data underneath is solid.
It’s the same shift we broke down in paper vs. Excel vs. inventory software. Notebooks record what happened. Spreadsheets can add it up. But neither tells you what your business is worth at this moment. That takes a system that updates as you trade.
If this sounds familiar
You don’t have to sell cosmetics ingredients to recognise the problem. If you run a pharmacy, a supermarket, an agro supply business — anything where you buy stock and sell it, you’ve probably wondered what all that inventory is actually worth. And you’ve probably been guessing.
Mayloo tracks your stock, shows your inventory value as it changes, and generates professional invoices when you sell. All on your phone.