Gas Stocktake and Shortages: Handle Missing Kg Honestly

The pain: the kg that nobody sold

Every experienced gas seller knows the sinking feeling. The records say the tank should hold 85kg. The gauge, and your own eyes, say something closer to 70kg. Fifteen kilograms of gas, roughly ₦18,000 of cost, has simply gone.

Where? Maybe a slow leak at a valve. Maybe spillage during transfers, a little at every fill. Maybe generous measuring by an attendant. Maybe outright theft. LPG is a product that literally evaporates, and some level of loss is a physical reality of the trade.

The real damage, though, is what happens next in most businesses: nothing. The shortage is never written anywhere, so it silently disappears into a vaguely disappointing profit figure. Or worse, the seller quietly adjusts the numbers to make them balance, and now the books are cooked. Either way, you lose twice: once when the gas escaped, and again when the information about it escaped too.

What Gazeloft's stocktake does, and the honest rule behind it

A stocktake in the Gas space is simple: you physically measure what you actually have and enter it. Gazeloft compares your counted kg against recorded stock and finds the difference.

What it does with a shortage is where the design gets deliberate:

• The full cost of the missing kg is booked as a stock loss. No averaging games, no repricing. The missing kg are costed from the refill batch they belonged to, at that batch's real cost, and the loss is pinned to that specific refill. When you later look at that batch in the Refills report, you see exactly how much of it leaked away.
• Stock loss is shown separately and is NOT subtracted from your headline profit. This is the honest part. Your headline profit answers one question: on the gas I actually sold, did I make money? Mixing leakage into that number would blur two very different problems. A station can have excellent selling margins and a terrible leak, and those need different fixes. Gazeloft keeps the selling profit clean while keeping the leak fully visible in its own line.
• Stock comes back into line. After the stocktake, recorded stock matches physical reality, so the stock guard and future FIFO costing continue from the truth.

Think of it as two separate scoreboards: how well you sell, and how well you keep what you bought. Gazeloft refuses to let one hide the other.

Step by step: running a stocktake in the app

1. Pick a consistent moment. End of day or first thing in the morning, when no sales are happening. Weekly is a good rhythm for most stations; busy ones do it more often.
2. Measure honestly. Use your gauge, scale or dip method, the same way every time. Consistency of method matters more than perfection.
3. Enter the counted kg. Open the stocktake in your Gas space and record what you physically found.
4. Review the shortage. Gazeloft shows the difference in kg and books the stock loss at the full batch cost, pinned to the refill it came from. There is nothing to calculate.
5. Read the result in context. The dashboard keeps your selling profit unchanged; the stock loss appears as its own visible figure, and the Refills report shows which batch carried the shortage.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

On gazeloft.com you can run the same stocktake from your Gas space, and the web is often the better place to review the aftermath. Open the Refills report and look down the shortage column: every batch shows its own missing kg and their cost. Two months of stocktakes on one screen will tell you quickly whether your losses are a steady background hiss (normal evaporation and spillage) or spiking on particular refills (a valve problem, a handling problem, or a person problem).

A worked example: Ngozi finds her leak

Ngozi runs a gas station in Owerri. Her current batch is a 300kg refill bought at ₦1,190 per kg (₦357,000). Over two weeks she records sales of 216kg, so recorded stock says 84kg remain.

Sunday evening she runs a stocktake. The physical measure says 71kg. Shortage: 13kg.

Gazeloft books a stock loss of 13kg at ₦1,190 = ₦15,470, pinned to that refill batch. Her recorded stock resets to 71kg.

Now look at her numbers, the way Gazeloft presents them:

• Sales: 216kg at ₦1,430 average = ₦308,880 revenue.
• Cost of goods sold: 216kg at ₦1,190 = ₦257,040.
• Headline selling profit: ₦51,840. This number is untouched by the shortage, because on the gas she sold, this is genuinely what she made.
• Stock loss, shown separately: ₦15,470 on that batch.

The Refills report row for this batch now tells the whole story in one line: bought 300kg for ₦357,000, sold 216kg for ₦308,880, net so far ₦51,840, shortage 13kg costing ₦15,470, 71kg still open.

Because the loss was visible instead of buried, Ngozi did something about it. She had her regulator and hose connections checked (₦4,000, recorded as an expense) and tightened her filling procedure. The next stocktake, three weeks later, showed a shortage of only 3kg. That is a real ₦11,000 per cycle recovered, and she can prove it, because both stocktakes are in the record.

If the ₦15,470 had been silently subtracted from her headline profit, she would have concluded "gas margin is weak this month" and maybe raised prices, the wrong fix for a leaking valve.

Tips and pitfalls

• Never skip the stocktake because you fear the result. The shortage exists whether you measure it or not. Measuring it is the only way it ever gets smaller.
• Keep the measuring method identical every time. Changing methods creates fake shortages and fake recoveries that teach you nothing.
• Watch the trend, not one number. A single 4kg shortage is weather; 4kg every single week is climate. The pinned-to-batch design makes trends easy to see.
• Do not "fix" shortages by editing sales or refills. That destroys the honesty of your batches. The stock loss entry exists precisely so the record can absorb reality without being rewritten.
• Pair stocktakes with worker handovers. If different attendants run different shifts, a stocktake at handover tells you which shift the losses belong to, without accusation or guesswork.

The leak you can see is the leak you can fix

Every gas station loses some kg. The difference between a profitable station and a struggling one is often just whether the owner can see the loss. Run your first stocktake this week and put a number on it. Free to start, no card needed. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.