In a neighbourhood shop, credit is not an option: it is part of the trade. The customer takes two bars of soap and a litre of oil and pays on Saturday. The neighbour takes phone credit every other day and settles at the end of the month. Without credit the shop loses half its regulars. With badly kept credit, it loses its money.
The problem is almost never the customer. It is the book.
Why the notebook always ends up lying
A hand-written debt book is accurate on day one. Then three things happen to it, always the same three.
You write it later. The customer is in a hurry, two others are waiting, you say "I'll note it after". After, you no longer know whether it was 1,500 or 2,500. You write what you remember.
You write it in two places. The owner has a notebook, the seller has a scrap of paper, the customer has her own memory. Three versions, none of them agreeing.
You note the take, not the payment. The customer pays 5,000 against 12,000, you take the money, you say thank you, and the line stays at 12,000 because someone interrupted. Two weeks later, an argument.
None of these is a character flaw. It is what happens to any notebook kept by someone who also has a shop to run.
The rule: one page per customer, not one page per day
The book that works is organised by customer, not by date. Every customer who takes credit has their own page, and that page has only three columns:
| Date | Taken | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Sept | 2,500 (oil, soap) | |
| 6 Sept | 2,000 | |
| 9 Sept | 1,000 (phone credit) |
At the bottom of the page, one figure: what is left. You recalculate it at every line, not at the end of the month.
Why it changes everything: when the customer comes back, you open her page and see her history in ten seconds. No searching through three weeks of dates. And she can read it too. A book you can show a customer without embarrassment is a book that adds up.
Write before you hand over, not after
This is the only discipline that matters, and the hardest. The goods do not leave the counter until the line is written. Even if the customer is in a hurry. Even if it is your cousin.
One sentence helps: "I'll note it and give it to you." Said out loud, it becomes a habit within a week, and customers come to expect it. The ones who grumble are, in general, the ones you would rather hear grumble now than argue with later.
Payment follows the same rule. The money goes into the drawer and the line gets written, in the same movement. If you cannot write it straight away, do not take the money straight away: "One second, let me note it."
Review every Saturday, not every month end
Once a week, a quarter of an hour, shop closed or quiet: you go through the pages and ask yourself three questions.
- Who has paid nothing for more than two weeks? They get a message before Monday. Not a threat, a reminder; we cover it in Chasing a customer who owes.
- Who has gone past their limit? Every customer should have a ceiling, even a rough one. How to set it: How much credit to give.
- How much does the shop have out there, in total? Add up the "left" of every page. That total is the shop's money sleeping at customers' homes. If it grows three weeks in a row, the shop is emptying without you seeing it in the drawer.
Month end is too late: a five-week-old debt recovers half as well as a ten-day-old one.
A receipt, even for credit
When a customer takes on credit, they leave with a receipt, as if they had paid. The receipt shows what they took, what they now owe, and the date. On paper or on their phone, it does not matter.
It sounds heavy. It is the opposite: the receipt is what avoids the conversation "I never took that". It makes the debt a thing written on both sides. And the day the customer pays, they have a receipt that says "paid 5,000, 7,000 left". No argument possible, because there are no longer two memories, there is a piece of paper.
Where Remora Sales comes in
Everything above can be done with a notebook and a pen. What a notebook cannot do is what Remora Sales does for you:
- one page per customer, kept on its own: the credit take is written at the moment of sale, from the till, and the "left" recalculates without anyone doing the sum;
- the payment on the right line: when the customer settles, the till records the cash and updates the account in the same movement;
- the receipt that goes to their phone, through Nyocte, or on WhatsApp and SMS if they are not on it yet, with what they owe written on it;
- the reminder sent from the customer's account, in one tap, when you do your Saturday review;
- the same book across two shops, or between two sellers, without the versions drifting apart.
And if the network drops at the moment the customer takes on credit, the line is still written on the phone and goes up when the signal returns. The book does not depend on the connection. That is the starting point of the whole till: the sale goes through when the network drops.
If your debt book gives you cold sweats on Saturdays, ask us to set up your shop. We look together at how it is kept today, and load your credit customers before the first morning.