MoneyShop money
What your shop owes and what it is owed
Your shop's worth is not today's sales. Put what customers owe you, your stock at cost and your cash on one page, then subtract everything you owe.
One page, four lines, one evening
- 1Add up what people owe you, then split it by ageA balance from a season ago is not the same asset as one from a fortnight ago.
- 2Count your stock at what you paid, never at the sticker priceThe difference between buy and sale is not yours until somebody actually buys.
- 3Count the cash in the galla, the bank and the mobile accountThen take out anything sitting there that belongs to somebody else.
- 4List everything you owe, including what nobody is chasingSupplier bills, rent due, salary earned but unpaid, money borrowed from family.
- 5Subtract, write the total, date the sheet and keep itTwo dated totals some months apart say more than a year of daily sales figures.
What your shop is worth is not today's sales. It is one page: what customers owe you, plus your stock at what you paid for it, plus your cash, minus your supplier bills, your rent, your unpaid salaries and what you borrowed. Build it once in an evening. Read it in five minutes a month.
Today's sales tells you almost nothing
Ask a dukandar how the day went and the answer comes in two seconds. Rs 18,000. Ask him what the shop is worth and you get a shrug, or a number that moves by Rs 200,000 depending on his mood.
Half past eight, shutter down to the knee. Rashid is stacking the day's notes under the weighing pan and it has been a strong stretch. He sold more than the stretch before it. Yet on Saturday the biscuit supplier wants Rs 62,000 and there is Rs 19,000 in the galla. So he decides he must have wasted the money somewhere.
He has not. Nothing is missing. His money is sitting in other people's houses and on his own shelves, and he has never once put all four sides of his shop on the same sheet of paper.
The page is short. Three things that are yours, one thing that is not. What people owe you, your stock, your cash. Minus everything you owe. What is left is the answer to the only question that really matters: if the shop stopped trading tonight and every account was settled, what would be yours?
This is not profit. Profit is what a stretch of trading earned you. The page is what you are holding. A shop can earn well and be worth very little, and that happens far more often than any dukandar expects.
What people owe you, and how old each rupee is
Start with the khata. Add up every open balance and you have a number. Say Rs 185,000.
That number is easy to get and nearly worthless on its own.
Rs 185,000 owed by people who bought in the past few weeks is almost cash. It walks back in by itself. Rs 185,000 that has been sitting since a season ago is a different animal. Some of it is money. Some of it is a story you keep telling yourself.
So split the total by age. Four buckets are plenty:
- Under 30 days. Treat it as money.
- 30 to 90 days. Money, probably, after a reminder.
- 90 days to six months. Count half of it, or whatever your honest opinion says.
- Older than six months. Write down what you truly believe will come, not the figure in the book.
That last line is the one everybody skips, and skipping it is how a shopkeeper carries a dead Rs 40,000 on his page for years while feeling perfectly comfortable.
Nobody is asking for certainty here. Your honest guess, written down once, is enough. The point of writing it is that the same guess is not made fresh and generously every time you feel optimistic.
Pen and bahi will do. It takes one evening. The names are already there. Only the dates need reading.
Your stock, at what you paid for it
Here is where the comfortable mistake lives.
You walk the shelves. Forty cartons, a rack of soaps, three cases of cooking oil. Then you total it at the price on the sticker, because that is the price you know by heart. On paper your shop has just gained Rs 90,000 that has never existed.
Stock goes on the page at what you paid. Your buy rate. Nothing else.
Value the shelves the way a buyer would, not the way you hope
Count it this way
- Forty cartons at the Rs 900 you paid the supplier for each.
- The slow hair oil at Rs 60, because that is what it would fetch today.
- Broken and expired goods at zero, and out of the count entirely.
- Stock taken on supplier credit counted in, and its bill counted on the other side.
Not this way
- Forty cartons at the Rs 1,150 sticker price on the shelf edge.
- The slow hair oil at the Rs 240 it cost you three seasons ago.
- A rough guess of the whole shop, taken once and never counted again.
- Goods a customer has already paid an advance on, counted as fully yours.
The reason is simple. The gap between your buy rate and your sale rate is not yours until somebody actually buys the thing. Until then it is a hope, and hopes do not belong on a page about what you own. Half that oil may go out at a discount. Some of it may not go out at all.
While you are counting, be honest about the dead corner. The dusty stack at the back that nobody has asked for since the day it arrived is not worth its buy rate either. Stock that will not sell is not an asset, it is money you already spent. Value it at what somebody would pay you today to take it away, even if that is a third of what it cost.
Nine at night, a Tuesday. Naeem went up the ladder with a torch to count the top shelf and found eleven boxes of a hair oil brand he stopped stocking three seasons back. He had been carrying them at Rs 240 each in his head. He wrote them in at Rs 60 and felt worse for an hour and better for a year.
Your cash, minus the part that is not yours
Three places, usually. The galla. The bank account. The mobile money account on your phone.
Count all three on the same evening at the same hour, or the number means nothing.
Then take out what is sitting in there but belongs to somebody else. An advance a customer paid for goods you have not handed over. A deposit against an order. Cash a relative left with you to hold. Money in your galla is not automatically money that is yours.
Take the house money out too, if the two are still mixed. If you cannot say which rupee is the shop's and which is the kitchen's, this page cannot be built at all. Keeping shop money and house money apart is the habit everything else stands on.
And if your galla and your book argue with each other most evenings, settle that first. The daily count is a separate job, and it is the one that keeps this page honest.
Everything you owe, including what nobody is chasing
Now the other side. This is the side shopkeepers undercount, because a debt nobody is shouting about stops feeling like a debt.
Write all of it down:
- Supplier bills. Every one, including the ones with a comfortable date on them.
- Rent due, or the part of the term the landlord has already earned.
- A helper's salary for days already worked and not yet paid.
- The electricity bill lying on the counter.
- Money borrowed from a brother or an uncle years ago that everybody has politely stopped mentioning.
That last line decides whether this is a real page or a nice feeling. Family money is still money. It does not stop being owed because nobody asks for it.
Buying stock on credit is normal and often the smart move. It only turns dangerous when the bills are spread across three notebooks and a memory, so that nobody, you included, knows the total.
The page, built in one evening
Say a general store puts all four sides down.
Say a general store sits down one evening and builds the page
Only an example, never a claim about any real shop. Put your own four lines in and the arithmetic works the same way.
Look at what that sheet just did. The shop is busy, the khata is fat, the shelves are full. And what is honestly its own is a fraction of what the shelves suggest. That is not a disaster. It is a fact the owner can act on, which he could not do while the number was a shrug.
Write your own page on one sheet, and date it. Fold it into the back of your bahi. Some months later, write the new one underneath. Two dated totals on the same sheet are a picture no daily sales figure will ever give you.
If your khata, your stock with its buy rates, your cash and bank accounts and your supplier bills already live in Wasoolo, all four sides are being kept as you work, and the page becomes something you read instead of something you rebuild. The app is 100% free to download.
Start your digital khata today
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What the number tells you when it moves
Two shops on the same street. Same sales, same profit. One holds most of its worth as stock and cash. The other holds most of it in the khata.
Same street, same sales, same profit, different health
Three questions this page answers that nothing else does.
"Why do I feel poor in a good month?" Put the new page beside the one before it. If the total went up while the cash line fell and the khata line swelled, you did not lose money. You converted it into other people's promises. The shop grew and the galla shrank. That is a real thing, and now it has a name.
"Can I take the big stock order?" A supplier offers a good rate on a large lot. Look at the page, not at the offer. If your recent khata and your cash together do not already cover the bills with dates on them, the discount is not a discount. This is also where knowing what the shop must sell to cover its costs turns the answer from a feeling into arithmetic.
"What is the shop worth?" A brother-in-law asks at a wedding. A son wants to know whether to join. A buyer makes an offer. Without the page you either boast or undersell, and both cost you.
Sunday morning, ten o'clock, shutter still down. Yasir's elder brother sat on the step and asked outright what the shop would fetch if it were sold. Yasir had the sheet folded inside his bahi. He read out four lines and one total. The conversation took six minutes instead of the six weeks of bad feeling everybody had been expecting.
Five minutes a month, not five minutes a day
The building is a one-off. After that it is a reading.
Daily belongs to the galla. Count the cash, match it to the book, close the day. Different job, different purpose, and the two should never be mixed.
Once a month, on a fixed day, give it five minutes:
- Read the khata total and its age split.
- Read the stock at buy rate, adjusted only for anything large that came in or died.
- Read the cash across all three places.
- Read the total of what you owe.
- Write one line at the bottom and compare it with the line above it.
In Wasoolo those four readings are four screens, which is the whole reason a monthly check can take five minutes instead of an evening.
Do not do this weekly. A weekly number jumps around for reasons that mean nothing, and you will start making decisions about noise. A monthly line tells you the direction, and direction is the point.
And do not chase a bigger number for its own sake. A page that rose because the khata swelled is a warning, not a win.
Start your digital khata today
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Common questions
Is this the same as working out my profit?
No. Profit says what a stretch of trading earned. This page says what the shop is holding right now, after everything owed to it and everything it owes. You need both, and they answer different questions.
I bought the same item at three different rates. Which one do I use?
Use the most recent rate you paid for it. Nobody is auditing you. Being consistent from one month to the next matters far more than being exact.
Should the shop building, the freezer and the fittings go on the page?
Put them in only if you own them and would actually sell them, and then at what they would fetch today, not what they cost. Most small shops leave rented premises and old fittings out and lose nothing by it.
What if my total comes out negative?
It happens, and it is information rather than a verdict. Usually it means the khata is old and the supplier bills are fresh. Work the oldest balances hard, slow down on new udhaar, and watch the line for two or three readings before you panic.
How old does a balance have to be before I stop counting it as money?
There is no fixed line. Use the rhythm of your own shop. If a name has bought nothing and paid nothing for six months, count a part of it and stop pretending about the rest.
Do I have to show this page to anybody?
No. It is for you. Show it only when you choose to, and it is worth having ready for the one conversation where somebody asks what the shop is really worth.