Default Buy Prices and Stock Targets for Scrap Dealers

The pain: typing the same price forty times a day

Every scrap dealer knows the rhythm of a busy morning. PET is ₦150 per kg today, and it will be ₦150 per kg for every one of the forty Customers who come through the gate. Yet a careless record system makes you type 150 forty times, and on the thirty-first time your tired thumb types 105 or 510, and now your books disagree with your cash.

The second pain is quieter. You buy and buy, but you never quite know when to call the Buyer. Is the PET pile 1,400 kg or 1,900 kg? Is it worth a truck yet? Dealers guess by eye, call too early and pay for a half-empty truck, or call too late and watch prices slip while capital sleeps in the yard.

What default prices and stock targets are

Gazeloft solves both problems in the material settings of your Recycling space.

Default buy prices. Each material carries a default buy price per kg that you set once. When you open a Buy Waste Product entry and pick PET, ₦150 is already filled in. You confirm and move on, or override it for a single negotiation without touching the default. When the market shifts, you edit the default once and every entry after that uses the new figure.

Stock targets. Each material also carries a stock target in kilos, which should be the size of a load worth selling: the truckload your Buyer collects, or the minimum quantity that makes their price worthwhile. As Buy entries accumulate kilos, Gazeloft shows how close each material is to its target, so "should I call the Buyer" becomes a glance instead of a guess.

Together they turn your materials list into a control panel: today's price and today's progress for every material you trade.

Step by step: setting up in the app

1. Open your Recycling space settings and go to your materials.
2. For each material, set the default buy price per kg: PET ₦150, aluminium cans ₦900, carton ₦70, or whatever your market says today.
3. Set the stock target per material: PET 2,000 kg, cans 300 kg, carton 1,500 kg, matching what your Buyers collect.
4. When market prices move, come back and update the default. Entries from that moment use the new price. Old entries keep the price they were recorded at, as they should.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

On gazeloft.com the same material settings are available in your Recycling space, often easier to review on a big screen. A good habit is a Sunday evening review: check each default against what the market and your Buyers are saying, adjust, and start Monday with correct prices already loaded for your whole team, because workers making entries get the same defaults automatically.

How defaults and targets work together

The real power appears when the two settings talk to each other. Your default buy price controls how fast money leaves; your stock target controls when money comes back. Suppose PET costs you ₦150 per kg and your target is 2,000 kg. Filling that target ties up about ₦300,000 of float, and the target bar tells you how deep into that commitment you already are. If cash is tight, the bar tells you which materials to pause: the one at 90 percent of target is nearly ready to convert back into cash, so feed it, while the one at 20 percent can wait a week. If cash is plentiful, the bars show where an extra push would finish a load early and get a truck booked sooner. Some dealers even run the numbers backwards: they decide how much float they can afford to lock into each material, divide by the buy price, and set the target from that. Either direction works, because the point is the same: the pile in the yard and the money it swallowed stop being separate mysteries and become one picture you can plan around.

A worked example: the price update that saved a margin

Tunde trades PET and cans in Aba. His settings: PET default ₦150 per kg, target 2,000 kg; cans default ₦900 per kg, target 300 kg.

Mid-month, his aggregator warns that PET will drop from ₦250 to ₦230 per kg at the next collection. Tunde does one thing: he edits the PET default from ₦150 to ₦135. Every agent's entries from that minute pay the new price, no announcements needed at the scale, the app simply fills in ₦135.

Result at collection: he sells 2,050 kg at ₦230, earning ₦471,500. His blended cost is about ₦146 per kg (early buys at ₦150, later buys at ₦135), roughly ₦299,300 in total, keeping about ₦172,200 of margin. Had he kept buying at ₦150 all month, his margin would have shrunk by more than ₦20,000. One field edited once protected the whole load.

Meanwhile the targets did their quiet work: the PET bar hit 100 percent two days before the truck came, so Tunde booked the collection with confidence instead of climbing the pile to guess.

Tips and pitfalls

• Update defaults the moment your Buyer signals a change. Your buy price must follow your sell price. The default field is where that discipline lives.
• Set targets from the Buyer's economics, not your yard size. The right target is the quantity that earns the best price or fills the truck, because transport is often your biggest hidden cost per kg.
• Do not fight the override. Defaults are the rule, overrides are the exception. If a Customer brings 200 kg of unusually clean PET and deserves ₦160, override that one entry and keep the default at ₦150.
• Review shrinkage against your target. If you always sell about 3 percent less than the stock you accumulated, consider setting your working target slightly above the truck size so a full truck is truly full.
• Keep dead materials out. If you stopped trading a material, remove or ignore it so agents cannot pick it by mistake.

Two settings, hours saved

Five minutes setting default prices and stock targets pays you back every single day: faster entries, fewer typos, and a clear signal for when to sell. Open your material settings tonight and tune them, at gazeloft.com.