Writing
Written for businesses that keep their books in birr. Every figure here links to whoever published it — proclamations, regulator guidelines, peer-reviewed research — because a number you cannot check is not worth reading.
21 pieces · 37 topics
Ethiopian practice
Written for a business that keeps its books in birr and files with the Ministry of Revenues. The facts are primary — proclamations, directives, regulator guidelines — and checkable by anyone who follows the link.
The framework is law, the rollout dates are not published yet, and that gap is the most useful moment to understand it. Here is what changes about issuing an invoice, and what it means for a shop that sometimes loses its connection.
Formal retail in Addis is multiplying, and it is multiplying in a particular shape: domestic groups adding a third and fourth branch. That shape is exactly what a single-shop spreadsheet cannot survive.
Every unit on your shelf was bought with money that had a price. When that price goes up, the cost of being wrong about what to buy goes up with it — and most stock reports never mention it.
The paperwork around an import got lighter this year. The arithmetic behind it did not, and it is the arithmetic that determines whether the line you think is your best seller is actually making money.
The number your system prints for closing stock is not a fact about your shelves. It is the result of a policy choice, and in Ethiopia that choice sits inside a framework with legal force behind it.
Advice about barcode scanning usually assumes every product arrives with a barcode. In an Ethiopian shop, a good share of what you sell does not. That does not mean scanning is off the table; it means you need two answers.
The regulator has done the hard part of this problem for you. The information you need for batch-level stock control is already required to be on the pack — the gap is that almost nobody reads it into a system.
Cash has one virtue no digital payment can match: the record and the money are the same object. Once a customer pays from a wallet, your sale and the money that settled it live in two different systems — and someone has to make them agree.
Most VAT errors at a counter are not evasion. They are one multiplication done in the wrong direction, repeated a few thousand times a year.
Payroll is the part of running a shop where a small misunderstanding compounds monthly and surfaces at an audit. This is one payslip, worked all the way through, with the instrument behind each line named.
Research
Claims about stock, stockouts and shrink, resting on published research rather than on software marketing. Three of these rest on journal articles, which is the point: the argument for an accurate count should not come from the people selling the count.
When stock goes missing, the instinct is to suspect people. Sometimes that is right. But the standard definition of shrinkage contains three causes, and only one of them is theft.
For anyone selling something that can go off, loss is not an exception to manage — it is a structural cost of the category. The regional figures are stark, official, and more conservative than the ones usually quoted.
Your sales are reasonably steady. Your purchase orders are not. That gap is not a failure of discipline on your part — it is a well-documented property of supply chains, and it has a name and four causes.
The full stock count is a ritual: shop closed, everyone in on a Sunday, a number at the end that nobody quite believes. There is a better way to spend the same hours, and there is published support for it.
Everyone agrees stockouts cost sales. Far fewer people can say how much, or where the sale goes instead — and the answer is more useful than the agreement, because most of it is invisible in your own till.
Every argument for taking stock control seriously rests on one premise: that the number in your system is usually not the number on your shelf. That premise has been measured, by academics, at a retailer that already had a real system.
Method
No statistics, because these are not claims about the world — they are explanations of method, worked in birr on a realistic set of numbers. The kind of thing that gets read once and then used.
Most stock software assumes you buy things and sell the same things. A bakery buys flour and sells bread, which means the stock record has to be able to turn one thing into another — and account for the difference.
Consignment is a good arrangement badly recorded almost everywhere it exists. The stock is physically with you, so it goes in the count; it is not yours, so it should not be in the valuation. Both of those are true at once.
An aging report is usually read as a to-do list for chasing payments. It is more useful read as a statement of how much of your business you are currently financing on someone else's behalf.
One of the most ordinary things a shop does is also one of the most common sources of a wrong stock figure: buying in one unit and selling in another.
Getting this wrong does not produce an error message. It produces a margin figure that is confidently, consistently wrong, in a direction you will not notice.
Figures on this site are attributed to the organisation that published them, with a link. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than choosing the flattering number.
