Keeping records on your phone: for a small shopkeeper

A shop owner rarely sits in one place: in the morning goods arrive, through the day he runs between shelves and customers, and he visits the market or a wholesale depot. The computer often stays in the back room or at home, while the phone is always in his pocket. If the records are open on the phone too, an entry can be found in seconds, at the delivery, at the shelf or when a customer asks "do you have this?". Below are practical rules for keeping records on a phone. As an example, take a cosmetics and accessories shop in Fergana: lipsticks, shampoos, hair ties.

What a phone is good and bad for

A phone is convenient for entering receipts and counts on the spot, checking a balance or price quickly and photographing a delivery note. It is awkward for writing complex formulas, analysing a large table or building reports with dozens of columns. So divide the work: the phone is for entering and viewing, the computer for fixing and analysis. A five-column view is enough on the phone: code, name, balance, price, note. The rest stays on the computer.

The handiest setup is a separate receipts sheet with just three fields: date, code, quantity. The code is picked from a list, so there is no name to type and no typos. The balance is calculated from that data by formula and sits on a separate viewing sheet.

Four criteria for choosing an app

For work on a phone a simple spreadsheet app is usually enough (for example, the mobile version of Excel or Google Sheets). If you pick some other ready-made record-keeping app, check:

1. Does it work without internet and then update itself? At the market or in a basement stockroom the signal drops.
2. Can the data be exported to Excel or CSV? Otherwise you become tied to the app.
3. Is it protected by a password or fingerprint?
4. Can you share it with another person and limit their rights?

Some apps read barcodes with the camera. That is useful but not essential: internal codes work too.

Three everyday situations

Receiving. Photograph the delivery note by the truck and save it in a folder named with the date. At 9 a.m. 36 boxes of six kinds of goods arrive: checking against the note and entering each box in a "receipt" row on the phone takes about 15 minutes. That is much faster and more accurate than writing on paper and copying it into the computer in the evening.

Counting at the shelf. Open the list on the phone, walk along the shelf, count each item and type it into the "actual" column. 20 items take about 10 minutes. Ideal for a weekly check: the phone puts the figure from the records next to the one on the shelf.

In front of a customer. To the question "do you have this shampoo?" you need not run off to look. In the table, searching by the first letters of the name, you find the answer in 10 seconds. Freeze the top row (so column names are always visible) and learn to use search.

The most common mistakes on a phone

On a small screen it is easy to pick the wrong cell: "120" gets typed instead of "12", or a row shifts. After typing a quantity, glance over the row and widen the number column. Another hidden problem is the keyboard's autocorrect: it "corrects" a product name or internal code, and one product ends up recorded under two names. Switch autocorrect off or choose the name from a list.

Security and backup

A phone can be lost, dropped or stolen. So the table should live not in the phone's memory but in cloud storage, and the screen should be locked. An employee should work not in a personal phone holding your file but through a shared table with limited rights, and when he leaves, access is closed. Once a week save a copy of the table on a computer or elsewhere. If there is no internet, use offline mode or write on paper and enter it no later than the next day.

Conclusion

The phone takes records out of the "office" and to where the goods are. But an app does not create order by itself: if codes, names and opening balances are wrong, the table on the phone just shows wrong figures faster. If, before switching to the phone, you check balances, give goods codes and shelves addresses, the work gets much easier. The AniqHisob team can run a stock count and help set up that order.