VAT and Delivery, Built Into Every Sale, Invoice, and Order

A customer buys six cartons of hair extensions from you. NGN75,000. She runs a salon, she’s VAT-registered, and her accountant needs a proper invoice with the VAT broken out. You stare at the calculator. Is it 7.5% on top of NGN75,000? Inside it? Do you round? You guess, write a figure, and hand her the invoice hoping she doesn’t query it next week.

That guessing game is over. Mayloo now handles VAT and delivery on every sale, order, and invoice, and prints them cleanly on the receipt.

The way most Nigerian shops handle VAT today

Talk to ten shop owners about VAT and you’ll hear ten versions of the same workaround:

• Ignore it. Sell at the marked price, hope nobody asks for an itemised invoice.
• Add 7.5% on top after the totals are done. Customer queries the difference, you re-do the receipt.
• Bury it inside the price and assume it’s covered. When the accountant asks how much VAT you collected last quarter, you have nothing to show.
• Keep a calculator on the counter and do it by hand for every B2B customer. One wrong tap and you’ve under-quoted yourself.

A salon owner picks up six cartons of hair extensions at NGN12,500 each. She pays in full, then waits at the counter. “Can I get a proper invoice with the VAT separated? My accountant needs it.” Now you’re stalling. You don’t want to lose her, and you don’t want to redo the paperwork twice. So you scribble something on the back of the receipt and promise to email her a “cleaner version” later. You never do.

It used to be a B2C-only problem. It isn’t anymore. More wholesale and corporate customers are asking for VAT-itemised invoices because their own books require it. A receipt with the VAT folded in invisibly does them no good.

VAT-inclusive pricing, done by math, not by guesswork

Mayloo treats your shelf price as the price you actually charge, VAT included. You don’t enter a “net price” and then add tax on top. You enter what the customer pays. Mayloo works out how much of that was VAT.

Set the rate once, in Settings → Tax. Default is 7.5%. If you’re not VAT-registered, set it to 0 and Mayloo carries on quietly. If your category is different, change the number. That’s the whole configuration.

In numbers: sell something for NGN10,000 at 7.5% VAT, and the VAT inside that price is NGN697.67. The net amount is NGN9,302.33. The formula is the one your accountant uses: amount × rate ÷ (100 + rate). You’ll never have to remember it because Mayloo applies it for you.

You can also override the rate per product. A 0% VAT product (an exempt item, a basic medicine, a service line you don’t charge tax on) sits next to a 7.5% product in the same cart, and Mayloo handles each line correctly.

Two lines, two different rates, one correct total. No mental gymnastics at the counter.

One flat delivery fee, never taxed

Delivery isn’t a product. It isn’t VAT-able in most setups. And customers want to see it on its own line so they know what they’re paying for the goods versus what they’re paying for the rider.

In Mayloo, delivery is a single editable field on the order summary. You set it at the point of sale, on a wholesale order, or on an invoice you’re sending in advance. Default is zero, so if you don’t deliver, nothing changes for you. If you do deliver, you type the number once and it lands on the total and the printed receipt.

A wholesale order: ten jars of body butter at NGN6,500 each, NGN65,000 in goods. Dispatch rider to Surulere, NGN2,500. Total NGN67,500. Delivery sits on its own line, visible and unambiguous.

“Add 2,500 for delivery.” You add it once. It prints on the receipt. The conversation is over.

No more squeezing the rider’s fee into the price of a jar to “make the maths work.” No more handing back NGN500 in change because you double-counted.

What a Mayloo receipt now looks like

The totals block on every receipt now does the work for you:

Subtotal                     NGN10,000
Delivery                        NGN500
─────────────────────────────────────
Total                        NGN10,500
of which VAT                    NGN698

The “of which VAT” line is the part B2B customers’ accountants need. They take that number, file it against the purchase in their own books, and you never get the “can you redo the receipt” phone call.

The same breakdown shows up on the A4 PDF invoice, on the 80mm thermal print at the counter, and on the WhatsApp share when you send a receipt to a customer’s phone. If the order had no delivery and no VAT (a small walk-in sale at 0% VAT, say), the rows hide themselves so the receipt stays clean and the customer isn’t reading lines of NGN0.00.

If you haven’t set up professional receipts yet, that’s the place to start. The new totals block builds on that work.

Sales, orders, invoices: same rules, same math

One of the small frustrations of shop software is learning different rules for different documents. A POS sale calculates one way, an invoice another, an order yet another. By the end of the day your totals don’t reconcile and you can’t tell why.

Mayloo uses the same calculation engine for all three:

• Sales : a walk-in customer at the POS counter
• Orders : a wholesale buyer placing a larger order
• Invoices : a document you send before payment
• PDF exports, thermal prints, WhatsApp share, and Insights : same numbers, same way

Add items. The subtotal calculates inclusive of VAT. Add a delivery fee if you’re delivering. Hit save or print. The math is the same because it’s the same code doing it everywhere. When you reconcile at the end of the day, the totals match.

The Tax Collected report, so you know what you owe

The new Tax Collected report sits inside Insights. It groups every VAT-collecting sale by month and by rate, so at any point you can see exactly how much VAT you’ve taken in.

Export it to CSV and hand it to your accountant. No more digging through individual receipts at quarter-end to back-calculate what you collected. No more “best guess” remittance to FIRS.

End of May you open the report. You see NGN42,800 of VAT collected on 7.5% sales, NGN0 on 0% sales (those are your exempt lines). That’s the number that goes on the return. You’re not piecing it together from a notebook and a spreadsheet. You’re reading it off a screen.

If you’re not yet VAT-registered but thinking about it, the report quietly answers the question you can’t otherwise answer: what would my VAT liability have been on the last six months of sales? Set the rate to 7.5% for a month, watch the report fill in, and you have a real number to take to your accountant before you decide.

This pairs well with branch-level profit and loss when you want the full picture such as what each shop sold, what it kept, and what it owes.

A quick aside: Mayloo calculates what you’ve collected. Whether you should register, what rate applies to your category, and when to remit are questions for your accountant. The numbers we give you make that conversation a lot shorter.

Already on Mayloo? You don’t have to do anything

This update is backward compatible from top to bottom. The default VAT rate is 0%, and the default delivery fee is 0. Every sale, order, and invoice you’ve ever recorded in Mayloo carries on looking exactly the same. No prices have moved, no totals have shifted, no history is broken.

When you’re ready to switch it on, the whole setup is two taps:

1. Settings → Tax → enter your rate
2. New products inherit that rate by default. Override per product in the Advanced section if any item is exempt or charged differently.

That’s it. No migration, no re-entering prices, no broken history.

Stop dreading the VAT question

VAT used to be the part of the sale you dreaded calculating, and delivery was the line you forgot to add until the customer reminded you. Both now sit inside the same flow you already use for every sale. Set your rate once. Add a delivery fee when you need to. The receipt does the math, the report tells you what you collected, and your B2B customers stop asking you to “redo” the invoice.

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