How a supermarket in Kenya sells
A supermarket sells many small baskets quickly, across several tills, to customers who will not wait long. Most of what goes wrong shows up at the counter or on the shelf:
- Month-end queues. Salary week fills every till at once, and a slow cashier sends people to the shop next door.
- Network drops. A till that needs the internet to sell holds up the whole queue when the line goes down.
- Shared drawers. Two or three cashiers on one drawer over a long day make a shortage hard to trace.
- Bulk buyers. Kiosk owners, schools and churches buy by the bale and expect a better price than the shelf.
- Short-dated stock. Yoghurt and baby formula lose their value quickly if nobody watches the dates.
- Shrinkage. Missing stock is often found months later, when it can no longer be explained.
The sections below show which part of Wave POS deals with each one.
Fast tills for long queues
Wave POS keeps a cashier’s hands on the scanner and the keyboard. A USB barcode scanner adds each item with a beep, the numpad sets quantities, and F12 opens payment. Items without a barcode are found by name or SKU.
When a customer runs back for the bread they forgot, park the basket, serve the next person, and pick the sale up again. Line and basket discounts are there for promotions, but a large discount or a price change needs a manager’s PIN, so a big markdown never happens without a manager.
One sale can be paid in several ways, on one receipt. With your own ZetuPay account connected in Settings, the till sends an M-Pesa prompt to the customer’s phone; they enter their PIN and the payment records itself.
Selling through network drops
Your tills keep selling when the internet goes down. Every sale is kept on the till itself and sent, in the order it was made, once the connection returns, and receipt numbers carry on without gaps, so nobody reaches for a receipt book.
M-Pesa prompts need the internet, so while a till is offline the cashier records M-Pesa payments with the transaction code. If a price changed in the back office while a till was offline, the sale is still accepted and flagged for a manager. The offline selling page explains the details.
Bales, cartons and bulk buyers
Wave POS sells packs from the single units in stock. Set up a bale of 12 × 2 kg maize flour as a pack of the 2 kg packet: one bale sold takes 12 packets off the count, and a single packet sells as usual.
For bulk buyers, give an item a wholesale price that applies from a set quantity. A kiosk owner who buys 12 packets of sugar gets the wholesale price on that line without the cashier doing anything. For a regular trade customer, the cashier can switch the whole sale to wholesale with F3.
A Saturday basket, worked through
Here is one basket at a supermarket in Nakuru with three tills open:
| Item | Qty | Price | Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sugar, 2 kg | 2 | KSh 290 | KSh 580 |
| Maize flour, 2 kg | 1 | KSh 165 | KSh 165 |
| Fresh milk, 500 ml | 4 | KSh 65 | KSh 260 |
| Cooking oil, 3 L | 1 | KSh 980 | KSh 980 |
| Bar soap, 800 g | 1 | KSh 210 | KSh 210 |
The total is KSh 2,195. The customer pays KSh 1,000 in cash and KSh 1,195 by M-Pesa prompt, on one receipt. Stock falls at the Nakuru branch only, the sale records the cashier who served, and the dashboard’s sales-by-hour chart moves. Had the line dropped during the sale, the cashier would have taken the KSh 1,195 with the M-Pesa transaction code and the sale would have gone up later.
Cash, expiry and shrinkage under control
Every till runs shifts. A shift opens with a float, records cash in and out, and closes with a count that shows any variance, over or short. Cashiers on the same drawer switch in with their own PIN, and the shift report prints at close. Our cash drawer reconciliation guide has more on balancing the drawer.
For the goods that need it, record batch numbers and expiry dates when you receive stock. Expired or damaged goods come off through an adjustment that waits for a manager’s approval.
Stock takes can cover one category at a time: beverages on Monday, household goods on Tuesday. The tills keep selling while you count, because each figure is checked against the stock at the time you type it in; nothing posts until a manager completes the take. There is more on counting in our guide on how to do a stock take.
Branches and reports
Each branch has its own stock, tills, prices and settings, and you see them together on one dashboard. Transfers move stock between branches, and anything that does not arrive is recorded as lost in transit.
Thirteen reports cover sales, payments, VAT, products, stock, shifts, debtors, creditors and profit. Sales by hour shows when to open the extra till; low stock shows what to reorder before the shelf is empty. Every report exports to Excel, CSV or PDF.