Profit Today: How Gazeloft Computes Your Real POS Profit

The pain: "the money is plenty but I cannot see the gain"

Ask ten POS agents how much they made yesterday and you will get ten guesses. Not because they are careless, but because the honest calculation is genuinely hard. Profit at a POS desk is a thin layer of charges spread across dozens of transactions, with provider fees nibbling at every one, while hundreds of thousands of naira of other people's money flow loudly through the same drawer.

The big numbers drown the small ones. An agent who moved ₦900,000 today and earned ₦5,200 will remember the ₦900,000. So decisions get made against the wrong figure: they hire against turnover, spend against the drawer, and judge good days by queue length instead of by earnings. Then the month ends and the account does not agree with the feeling.

What profit today is

On the Gazeloft POS dashboard, profit today sits right beside cash at hand, and it answers one question only: of everything that happened today, how much is actually yours?

The computation is simple to state because the data underneath is recorded properly:

• In: every charge you typed on today's transactions. Withdrawal charges, deposit charges, bill payment charges, airtime and data margins, withdraw and send charges.
• Out: every itemised provider-side fee on those same transactions. Provider fee, debit fee, VAT, stamp duty, line by line as you recorded them.
• Ignored: everything that is not earnings. The amounts customers withdrew, deposited or sent are float movements, not income. Swaps are reclassifications. Add Fund is capital. None of them can inflate or deflate profit, because the entry types themselves carry that rule.

Profit today is therefore not an estimate and not a percentage guess. It is the sum of real prices you charged minus the real fees you logged. If a transaction is reversed, its charge and its fees drop out together, so a voided sale can never leave ghost profit behind. If you backdate an entry to yesterday, it counts in yesterday's profit, not today's.

Step-by-step: seeing and trusting the number

In the app:

1. Open your POS space. Profit today is on the dashboard next to cash at hand.
2. Record every transaction with its true typed charge and its itemised fees. The quality of profit today is exactly the quality of these two habits.
3. Tap into your history to see any entry's charge and fee lines when a day's figure surprises you.
4. Open Insights for the longer view: best and worst days, and how today compares.

On the web dashboard:

1. Log in at gazeloft.com and select the POS space.
2. The dashboard mirrors the app: cash at hand, profit today, latest transactions.
3. Use history filters to pull a single day and scan its charges when you want to audit where a figure came from.

Worked example: Ibrahim's full Wednesday

Ibrahim's stand in Kaduna, one full day, recorded as it happened:

Activity	Volume	Charges collected	Itemised fees
22 withdrawals	₦410,000 moved	₦4,650	₦1,410
9 deposits/transfers	₦265,000 moved	₦2,250	₦480
6 bill payments	₦74,000 moved	₦900	₦210
31 airtime/data sales	₦28,500 moved	₦930	₦0
3 withdraw and send	₦86,000 moved	₦1,650	₦420

Total money that passed through Ibrahim's desk: ₦863,500. Total charges collected: ₦10,380. Total itemised fees: ₦2,520.

Profit today: 10,380 minus 2,520 = ₦7,860.

Less than one percent of the money he touched is his. That is not bad news, it is POS economics, and knowing it changes everything. Ibrahim can now see that airtime, his smallest money mover at ₦28,500, produced ₦930 of pure margin with zero provider fees, while his 9 deposits produced ₦1,770 net. He can see that if he raised his withdrawal charge by ₦50 on the 22 withdrawals, profit today would jump by ₦1,100, a 14 percent raise from one pricing decision. None of this is visible in a drawer count.

One more thing the day proves: mid-afternoon Ibrahim swapped ₦100,000 of drawer cash to the bank and added ₦20,000 of his own money to float. Profit today did not move, because neither event was earnings. The number stayed ₦7,860, and that is the point.

Stretch the figure across a month and it becomes a plan. If Wednesday is a typical day, Ibrahim's stand earns roughly ₦204,000 a month before his own costs like rent, data and the daily generator fuel, which he also records so nothing hides. Against those recorded expenses of, say, ₦48,000, the stand nets about ₦156,000. That is a real number he can compare against a salary, a second terminal, or a second stand. Nobody makes that comparison from a heavy drawer.

Tips and pitfalls

• Type real charges, always. Discounted a regular? Charged extra at night? Record the real figure. Profit today is only as honest as the prices you enter.
• Never skip the fee chips. An entry with a charge but no fees books the gross as profit. Presets make fees one tap, so there is no excuse to skip them.
• Judge days by profit, not by drawer weight. A rainy Tuesday with 15 fat-charge transactions can out-earn a chaotic Saturday of thin ones. Insights will show you this pattern within weeks.
• Reverse mistakes instead of ignoring them. A reversed transaction pulls its charge and fees out of profit cleanly. An ignored mistake lies in your books forever.
• Compare profit to a wage. If profit today averages ₦6,000 across 26 working days, the stand pays about ₦156,000 a month. Now you can decide like a business owner: raise prices, extend hours, add a second terminal, or celebrate.

Meet your real number

You already know how heavy the drawer is. Now find out what is actually yours, every day, without arithmetic, at gazeloft.com.