Track every sale. Know your margins. Grow faster.

Daily takings versus actual profit

Counting the till at close tells you what came in. It does not net off the stock that went out, the supplier payment due next week, the generator diesel, the shop rent apportioned across the month, or the goods that spoiled or walked. A strong week by till and a losing week by margin look identical at close of business.

The fix is not more counting. It is recording purchases against the same period as the sales they produced, so a month can be read as a month rather than as thirty unconnected days.

Supplier bills are where the money is decided

Retail margins are set at purchase, not at sale. Two things move them more than anything a shop does on the floor:

• Buying terms — volume pricing, credit periods, and early-settlement discounts that are worth taking only if the cash is genuinely spare.
• Shrinkage and spoilage, which never appears on any invoice and is only visible as the gap between what stock should have produced and what it did.

Recording bills as they arrive rather than as they are paid also stops the most common cash-flow surprise in retail: a comfortable balance that already belongs to three suppliers.

Where retail sits under the 2025 Act

Most shops fall comfortably inside the small company definition — turnover of ₦100,000,000 or less and fixed assets of ₦250,000,000 or less — and therefore pay no Companies Income Tax and no Development Levy. That is worth confirming and documenting rather than assuming.

VAT is the live question. General merchandise is standard-rated at 7.5%; basic food is zero-rated. A shop selling both is charging two treatments across the same counter, and the ₦25,000,000 registration threshold arrives sooner than most owners expect once takings are totalled honestly across a year.