POS system for bookshops and stationers in Kenya

How bookshops and stationers sell in Kenya

A bookshop carries thousands of slow-moving titles next to a few hundred fast-moving stationery lines, and much of its year’s trade arrives in a few weeks around January, when schools open. Smaller rushes follow at the start of the second and third terms.

Parents queue with booklists, schools send long orders and want to pay later, and publishers deliver on credit. The usual problems are:

• Cashiers look up the price of each title, so the queue reaches the door.
• A school’s unpaid balance lives in an invoice book and is chased for months.
• The shop runs out of a Grade 7 textbook while the store room still has the old edition.
• Nobody is sure what is owed to which publisher.

Thousands of titles, imported from a spreadsheet

Import your titles from Excel or CSV with their ISBN barcodes, prices, categories and brands, and the scanner reads the barcode on the back cover like any other product. The barcode on a book carries its ISBN, so adding the ISBN as the product’s barcode is all a title needs to scan.

Categories keep the list in order, for example by grade, subject, revision books, storybooks and stationery, and the brand field can hold the publisher. Older stock without a printed barcode can be found by name or SKU at the till, or given a printed barcode label. The guide to moving from Excel walks through the import.

The January rush: queues, several tills and no waiting for the internet

Any computer or tablet with Chrome can be a till, so you can add tills for January; check pricing for the number of tills each plan includes. Each till is registered, numbers its own receipts without gaps, and keeps selling when the internet drops, sending its sales in order once the connection is back. More on offline selling.

A worked example: a parent arrives with a Grade 6 booklist.

She pays KSh 3,000 by M-Pesa and KSh 1,450 in cash in one split payment. If one title has to be fetched from the store room, the cashier parks the sale, serves the next parent, and picks it up again.

Schools and institutions on credit

Each school gets a customer account with a credit limit, and sales on account stay within it. The account’s ledger lists every sale, return and payment, the bursar settles by cheque, bank transfer or M-Pesa at the till, and the debtors ageing report shows how long each school has owed. Read more about customer credit.

Schools buying in bulk get wholesale prices that apply by themselves from a set quantity. A school in Machakos orders:

• 400 exercise books at KSh 48 instead of KSh 55, because the wholesale price starts at 100 books: KSh 19,200
• 4 boxes of A4 paper at KSh 3,300 a box: KSh 13,200
• 10 boxes of chalk at KSh 180: KSh 1,800

That is KSh 34,200 on an account with a KSh 100,000 limit. A second printer can print the order as a large ticket without prices for the staff packing it.

Packs, variants and stock takes

A box of five reams, a dozen exercise books and a packet of pens are packs that sell from the single units in stock: sell one box and five reams leave the stock. Variants keep related items together, such as a ballpoint pen in blue, black and red, or a counter book in 2, 3 and 4 quires, each with its own barcode and price.

Before January, count the textbook categories with a stock take: each count is compared with the stock at the time it is entered, and differences post only when a manager completes it.

Buying from publishers and distributors

Receive deliveries from publishers into stock at cost, starting from a draft, and keep an account for each one with what you owe and the payments you make; the creditors ageing report shows how long each balance has been owed. Every purchase updates the average cost that profit is measured against, so the product performance report shows which titles really make money. A publisher is set up like any other supplier; see purchasing and suppliers.