The Animal and Parts Catalog in Gazeloft, and Adding Your Own

Ask five butchers to write down the parts of a goat and you will get five different lists in five different spellings. That is fine for conversation. It is a disaster for records. If Monday's sale says "tozo", Wednesday's says "hump" and Friday's says "shoulder top", no report can ever add them up. The quiet foundation of every good record system is a shared vocabulary, and that is exactly what the Gazeloft catalog provides.

This article explains how the global catalog of animals, parts and expense categories works in the Meat Store space, why it is managed centrally, and how you can suggest new entries when your market sells something the catalog does not yet know.

The pain: freestyle records cannot be compared

When every seller types free text, three problems follow. First, your own history fragments: the same part under three names becomes three lines in every report, and your idea of your top selling part turns into nonsense. Second, onboarding staff becomes fragile: your worker's spelling differs from yours and the fragmentation multiplies. Third, the app cannot help you: smart defaults, quick presets and per-part insights all depend on the app knowing that a goat head today is the same thing as a goat head last month.

The opposite extreme is just as bad: a rigid list built by people who have never stood in a Nigerian meat market, missing half of what actually sells. Cow leg is not a garnish here, it is pepper soup royalty. A catalog that does not know the cuts your buyers ask for by name would be abandoned by sellers in a week, and rightly so.

What the feature is

Gazeloft takes a middle path with three moving parts:

• A global catalog maintained by the platform. Animals (cow, goat, ram, chicken and more), their parts (head, legs, rack, organs and so on) and expense categories all come from one centrally maintained catalog. Every Meat Store space draws from the same source, so records are consistent across your workers and your history.
• Seller suggestions. Any seller can suggest a new animal or a new part straight from the app. Sell grasscutter? Rabbit? A cut your region prizes that the list lacks? Send the suggestion in.
• Approval that benefits everyone. Approved suggestions are promoted into the global catalog and become available to every seller on the platform. Your suggestion in Kano can help a seller in Accra next month. The catalog grows from the ground truth of real markets, but stays clean because entries are reviewed before they go global.

Expense categories work the same way, so your market levy, transport, ice and slaughter fees are recorded under consistent names that your insights can aggregate properly, including the biggest spends insight.

Step by step: using the catalog in the app

1. Open your Meat Store space and start a sale.
2. Choose the animal from the catalog list. Your sticky defaults will usually preselect your main animal.
3. For a part sale, pick the part from the animal's parts list. No typing, no spelling, just a tap.
4. For expenses, pick the expense category the same way, then enter the amount and the payment source.
5. That is the whole discipline. Because every entry uses catalog items, your reports and insights aggregate perfectly without any cleanup.

Step by step: suggesting a new animal or part

1. When you search the catalog and your animal or part is not there, choose the option to suggest it.
2. Enter the name clearly. Use the name your market genuinely uses.
3. Submit. The suggestion goes to the platform for review.
4. Once approved, the entry joins the global catalog and appears for you and every other seller. Until then, record the sale in the closest sensible way, then switch to the proper entry once it is live.

On the web dashboard

The web dashboard uses the same catalog in its sale and expense forms, so entries recorded in the browser match entries from the phone perfectly. Owners reviewing insights on the web will see clean groupings: profit per animal by real animal names, part sales aggregated correctly, biggest spends by proper expense category. That cleanliness is the catalog quietly doing its job.

A worked example: the tozo suggestion

Hajiya Amina sells beef in Kano, where tozo, the hump of the zebu cow, is a premium cut with its own loyal buyers. In her first week she recorded tozo sales under a generic part, but the records itched: tozo sells at a premium and she wanted its numbers separate.

She suggested "tozo" as a part from the app. Once approved and live in the global catalog, she began recording it properly:

• Week's tozo sales: 9 sales totalling ₦74,000.
• Regular beef by kilo the same week: 210 kg at ₦4,500 per kg, ₦945,000.
• Her insight after a month: tozo is barely 7 percent of revenue, but its buyers are her most loyal customers, appearing in the top customers insight again and again.

She now reserves tozo for regulars and lets them know on WhatsApp when a good hump comes in. Meanwhile, every zebu seller on the platform who searches for tozo now finds it, because one seller in Kano took thirty seconds to suggest it.

Tips and pitfalls

• Search before you suggest. The part may already exist under a near name. Fewer duplicates keep everyone's lists clean.
• Suggest the market name. Use the name buyers and sellers actually say. A catalog entry nobody recognises helps nobody.
• Do not force a sale into the wrong part. If the right part is not live yet, use the closest honest option, and adopt the proper entry the day it is approved.
• Use expense categories consistently. Resist inventing workarounds. Your biggest spends insight is only as sharp as your categorisation.
• Pitfall: treating the catalog as a limitation. It is a shared language, and you can extend it. The suggestion flow exists precisely so that no real market item stays unrepresentable.
• Pitfall: recording test entries in your live space. Keep the space honest; experiment in your head, not in your books.