You opened your shop before the sun came up this morning.
Customers came. Goods moved. Money changed hands all day long.
But right now — sitting in that quiet moment after you have closed the door and counted whatever is left — something does not add up.
Where did it all go?
You had a busy week. You know that. Your hands were full from morning to night. The shop felt alive every single day.
But the money in your hand right now — it does not match the work you put in. It does not reflect the hours. It does not explain the effort.
I am working hard. Why is there nothing to show for it?
And the worst part is — you cannot explain it to anyone. Not to your wife when she asks. Not to yourself when you sit alone at night trying to think it through. You just know something is wrong. You just cannot say what.
You have tried writing things down. You started a notebook. You kept it for maybe two weeks. Then you stopped because there was no system — just scattered numbers that meant nothing when you looked back at them.
You have watched YouTube videos about bookkeeping. The man in the video was talking about dollars. About offices. About receipts from suppliers. About a business world that has nothing to do with your provisions store or your fashion shop or your food business.
That is not my kind of business. That system will never work for me.
So you go back to doing what you have always done. You work. You hope. You pray. And at the end of the month — the money is gone again and you still cannot explain where.
You are not alone. I have seen this story play out in hundreds of Nigerian businesses — from the busiest shops in Balogun market to the most hardworking provisions stores in Mushin. And I need to tell you something important.
The problem is not that your business is failing. The problem is that nobody is watching the door.
Drop everything you are doing now and listen to every word I am about to say.
Nigerian traders have always known how to watch their money. Go back far enough — before mobile banking, before POS machines, before any of the technology we have today — and you will find market women who knew to the last kobo what they bought, what they sold, and what remained. That discipline did not come from a textbook. It came from survival.
Somewhere along the way, we lost that discipline. We told ourselves it was too complicated. We waited for the right app, the right software, the right accountant. And while we waited — the money kept disappearing.
Hi, my name is Adeniyi A.N. FCA.
First thing you should know about me is that I am NOT selling a get-rich-quick scheme. I am a seasoned Chartered Accountant — Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria — who has spent over 15 years watching Nigerian businesses bleed money they did not have to lose. I have seen the accounts of large corporations and I have sat in tiny shops in Lagos counting someone's monthly takings by hand. And I will tell you something the textbooks never say:
The same problem destroys both. The money disappears because nobody is writing anything down.
Let me tell you about my neighbour, Baba Lanre.
Baba Lanre runs a provisions store on our street in Lagos. Has done for years. The man opens before 6am — I have seen his light on when I leave for early morning runs. He closes after 9pm. Seven days a week. No break. No holiday. Just work, work, work.
His shop is always full. Customers in and out all day. Goods moving off the shelves. Money changing hands constantly.
One evening I stopped by to buy something small. We got talking, the way neighbours do. And I asked him casually — the way you would ask a friend — "Baba Lanre, how much profit did you make last month?"
He went completely silent.
Not the silence of a man thinking. The silence of a man who has never been asked that question before. Or who has asked it of himself — and found nothing there to answer with.
He worked seven days a week for thirty days and he did not know if he had made a profit.
I walked home that evening and could not stop thinking about it.
Over the next few weeks, I started seeing what I could not unsee.
Iya Bisola — Baba Lanre's wife — would come to the shop sometimes in the evenings. I could hear them from next door. Not arguing exactly. But that quiet, heavy kind of conversation that married people have when something is wrong and neither of them knows how to fix it.
"Where is the money from this week?"
"I don't know. It went somewhere."
"How can you not know? You were there every day."
Baba Lanre was working himself to exhaustion and still feeling like a failure. Still unable to answer the one question that mattered most in his own home.
I felt helpless watching it. I am an accountant. I deal with money for a living. But what could I do? I could not just walk into a man's business and start rearranging things.
Then something happened that changed everything.
Baba Lanre called me one afternoon. He sounded different. Quieter than usual.
He had caught something. One of his most trusted shop assistants — a young man who had worked for him for two years — had been taking money. Not large amounts. Just ₦500 here. ₦1,000 there. Small enough that nobody would notice on any single day.
But it had been going on for months. And when Baba Lanre finally sat down and tried to calculate the damage — his best estimate was over ₦25,000 per month. Gone. Quietly. Without a trace.
Nobody knew. Because nothing was ever written down. There was no record to compare against. No daily total to check. No stock count that would flag a missing item. The door of his business had been wide open — and he had not even known it.
My father's words came back to me that evening. He said it to me once when I was young, and I never forgot it:
"A business with no records is a house with no door. Anybody can walk in and take what they want, and you will never know."
I offered to help. Baba Lanre agreed.
First I tried to explain double-entry bookkeeping. His eyes glazed over in thirty seconds. I do not blame him — it would put most people to sleep.
I downloaded a free Excel template from the internet. It was built for a corporate office. It had columns for departments and employee codes and tax reference numbers. Nothing to do with a provisions store in Lagos.
I showed him a YouTube video I had found about bookkeeping for small businesses. The man in the video was talking about invoices and receipts from registered suppliers. Baba Lanre buys half his stock from Alaba market with cash in hand and no paperwork. The video might as well have been in a different language.
I even looked into QuickBooks — the accounting software everyone recommends. Fifty steps before you can record a single sale. It needed constant internet access. It used terms that made no sense for a Lagos provisions store. We abandoned it after one afternoon.
Nothing was working. Everything I tried assumed a business that looks nothing like Baba Lanre's shop.
I was frustrated. I had fifteen years of accounting experience and I could not find a simple system that worked for a Nigerian small business. That felt wrong.
Around that time I was visiting family in Osogbo, Osun State. A gathering — relatives, neighbours, the kind of afternoon that goes long into the evening.
I found myself sitting next to an elderly man everyone called Alhaji Sulaiman. Quiet man. Dignified. The kind of person you do not rush to talk to because you sense they are listening even when they are not speaking.
We got talking. He asked what I did. I told him I was an accountant — just started my career. He nodded slowly.
Then he reached into a worn leather bag he had next to him and pulled out something I did not expect. A ledger book. Old. The cover was soft from years of handling. He placed it on the table between us.
"I carry this everywhere," he said. "I have carried one like it for thirty years."
Alhaji Sulaiman had run five provision warehouses across Osun State. For thirty years. Without a single accountant on staff. And he had never lost money he could not explain.
I asked him how.
He opened the ledger and showed me four columns. Simple. Clear. The same four columns — filled in every single day for three decades.
"All those big accounting things are for banks and governments," he said. "For a trader, you only need to know four things: what came in, what went out, what is on the shelf, and what is left. Four records. That is all. Everything else is noise."
I almost laughed.
I was a trained accountant. I knew about trial balances and income statements and consolidated accounts. And this old man was telling me that four simple columns is all a business needs?
But something about the certainty in his voice made me stop.
He was not guessing. He was not simplifying for my benefit. He was telling me something he had lived and tested for thirty years in the real world — in the same trading environment as Baba Lanre's shop. Five warehouses. Three decades. No losses he could not explain.
I wrote down everything he showed me before I left Osogbo that weekend.
Back in Lagos, I went to Baba Lanre's shop on a Saturday morning.
I sat with him for two hours. We set up four simple records — in a plain notebook he already had. No app. No software. No internet required. Just four columns that could be filled in with a biro at the end of each day.
His staff looked at us like we were wasting time. Baba Lanre himself was skeptical. "Is this all?" he asked, looking at the notebook.
The first few days were slow. Filling in the records felt tedious. Unnecessary. I had a moment — I will be honest — where I thought: maybe this really is too simple to work.
But we kept going.
By Day 7, something small shifted. Baba Lanre could tell me at the end of the day exactly how much had come in and exactly what had gone out. Not a guess. An actual number.
By Day 14, the picture was getting clearer. He could see which days were strong and which were quiet. He could see categories of expenses he had never noticed before.
Then came Day 11 of the second week.
We sat down to fill in the Monthly Profit Calculator for the first time. It takes three numbers — total sales, total expenses, total stock purchases — and produces one number: your actual profit.
Baba Lanre stared at the page for a very long time.
The number on the paper was ₦40,000 less than what he thought he had been making. Every month. For who knows how long.
He did not speak. He just sat there, looking at that number, turning it over in his mind.
That evening, Iya Bisola came to the shop. Baba Lanre showed her the completed Monthly Profit Calculator — the first one they had ever seen together.
She went very quiet.
Then she said: "So this is what has been happening to our money all this time? We have been losing this much and nobody knew?"
A long pause.
"At least now we know. Now we can fix it."
That night was the first time Baba Lanre and Iya Bisola sat down together and looked at their business numbers clearly. After years of tension and silence — they finally had something real to look at.
Since then, I have shared this same system with traders across Lagos and beyond.
A fabric seller at Balogun market — a woman who had been selling for years but felt like she was going backwards — used the Stock Movement Log for the first time and discovered she had been underpricing her fabric by 15%. She had not realised. The numbers never lied to her again.
A phone accessories trader in Computer Village — a young man convinced his business was failing — completed his first Monthly Profit Calculator and discovered something surprising. His business was actually profitable. The problem was his daily personal withdrawals from the till — ₦2,000 here, ₦3,000 there — that he had never counted as business expenses. The money was not disappearing. He was taking it. Now he knew.
These are not miracle stories. They are just what happens when you start writing things down — the right things, in the right order, in a system built for the way Nigerian businesses actually work.
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