Walk into any medium-sized shop, pharmacy, or restaurant in Kampala and ask the owner one question: how much stock do you have right now? Not approximately. Exactly.
Most cannot tell you. Not because they do not care, but because their inventory system is a notebook, a spreadsheet that has not been updated in two weeks, or a mental count that gets less accurate every day.
Where the Money Disappears
Inventory problems cost African businesses money in ways that are invisible until they add up. Shrinkage — stock that disappears due to theft, damage, or miscounting — is the obvious one. But the bigger cost is often overstocking and understocking.
Overstocking ties up cash in products sitting on shelves. For a business operating on thin margins, having two months of stock for a slow-moving item means that cash is not available for a fast-moving item that could generate revenue today.
Understocking means lost sales. A customer walks in, asks for a product you should have, and you do not have it. They go to the shop across the street. If it happens enough times, they stop coming back.
Why Spreadsheets Fail
Spreadsheets work when you have five products and one person managing them. They break when you have 200 products, multiple staff handling stock, and sales happening every hour. The spreadsheet is always behind reality. By the time someone updates it, new transactions have already made it inaccurate.
And that assumes someone is actually updating it. In practice, the spreadsheet gets updated once a week during a stock count, if it gets updated at all.
What Real Inventory Management Looks Like
Real inventory management is not complicated. It needs to do three things:
- Track what comes in.
- Track what goes out.
- Tell you what is left right now.
Not yesterday. Not last Tuesday. Right now.
It needs to be fast enough that updating it does not feel like extra work. It needs to be simple enough that any staff member can use it without training. And it needs to work on the devices people already have — phones, not expensive scanning hardware.
We are working on something for this. More details coming soon.
