How to Record Every POS Transaction Type in Gazeloft

The pain: one desk, five different money movements

A POS desk is not one business. It is five businesses squeezed into one plastic chair. Withdrawals move money one way. Deposits move it the exact opposite way. Bill payments and airtime run on separate float. And every notebook column that treats them the same produces totals that mean nothing.

This is why so many agents give up on records completely. Writing "20,000 in" or "50,000 out" tells you nothing a week later, because "in" for a withdrawal means something different from "in" for a deposit. The direction of cash and the direction of float depend on the type, and keeping that straight by hand at 6 pm with a queue in front of you is impossible.

Gazeloft solves this by making the transaction type do the thinking. You pick the type, enter the numbers, and the app applies the correct cash-delta rule for that type every single time.

What the transaction types are

The POS space covers the real desk:

• Customer withdrawal. The customer taps or transfers, you hand out notes. Cash-at-hand goes down by the amount given. Cash-in-bank goes up by the amount plus your charge.
• Deposit / transfer-in. The customer hands you notes, you send money from your float. Cash-at-hand goes up by what they handed you. Cash-in-bank goes down by the amount sent.
• Bill payment. NEPA, DStv, GOtv, water, betting wallets. The customer pays you, you settle the bill from your float, and your commission or charge is your earning.
• Airtime and data sales. Small amounts, huge volume. The customer pays cash or transfer, the top-up leaves your float, and your margin per sale is recorded.
• Withdraw and send (sent_out). The two-step classic: the customer withdraws and immediately sends most of it onward. One single entry captures the amount sent, the amount withdrawn and the cash you actually handed over. This one deserves its own article, and it has one in this series.

For every type you also record the charge you collected, typed by you, never auto-calculated, because street pricing is yours to set. And you record the payment method and fee method, so the app knows exactly which door the money used.

Step-by-step: recording each type in the app

1. Open your POS space and tap the new entry button.
2. Pick the transaction type first. This is the decision that sets the cash-delta rule.
3. Enter the amount (what the customer withdrew, deposited, sent or bought).
4. Type the charge you collected from the customer.
5. Tap the fee chips for the provider-side costs that apply to this type: provider fee, debit fee, VAT, stamp duty. If you set up presets, this is one tap.
6. Confirm the payment method (cash, transfer, card) and the fee method (charge paid in cash or deducted from the transaction).
7. Save. Drawer, float and profit all update instantly. For your regular amounts, use quick presets or repeat-last-entry and the whole thing takes seconds.

Step-by-step: on the web dashboard

At gazeloft.com the entry forms are identical: pick the POS space, choose the type, fill amount, charge, fees and methods, save. Many owners batch-enter the day's paper scraps in the evening from a laptop. If you are entering yesterday's transactions, use the date field to backdate them so the reports stay accurate.

Worked example: five customers, five types

Ngozi opens with ₦100,000 in the drawer and ₦400,000 float.

1. Withdrawal ₦20,000, charge ₦300. Drawer down to ₦80,000. Bank up to ₦420,300.
2. Deposit ₦50,000, charge ₦500 paid in cash. The customer hands over ₦50,500. Drawer up to ₦130,500. Bank down to ₦370,300.
3. NEPA bill ₦15,000, charge ₦200, paid in cash. Drawer up to ₦145,700. Float settles the bill: bank down to ₦355,300.
4. Airtime ₦1,000, margin ₦30, paid in cash. Drawer up to ₦146,700.
5. Withdrawal ₦5,000, charge ₦100. Drawer down to ₦141,700. Bank up to ₦360,400.

End of the run: drawer ₦141,700, float ₦360,400, gross charges ₦1,130. Ngozi did not calculate a single one of those numbers. She picked types and typed amounts, and the ledger stayed exact through five different money directions.

There is a bonus hiding in properly typed entries. Because each row knows what it is, Ngozi can attach a customer to a transaction and build a customer record with loyalty points, send a WhatsApp receipt at the moment of sale, and later see her business broken down by type in Insights: how much of her profit comes from withdrawals versus airtime, and which hours carry which types. A notebook column called "in" can never grow into any of that. A typed entry can.

Tips and pitfalls

• Type first, amount second. The most common notebook error is writing the amount and forgetting which direction it moved. In Gazeloft the type carries the direction, so picking the right type is the whole job.
• Do not lump airtime into deposits. Airtime and data have their own type and their own float behaviour. Mixing them hides your margin on the highest-volume thing you sell.
• Record the charge even when it is small. Thirty naira on airtime feels like nothing, but at 60 sales a day it is ₦1,800, often your quiet backbone.
• Use the fee method flag honestly. "Charge deducted from transfer" and "charge paid in cash" put the fee in different places. Guessing breaks the drawer count.
• Offline is fine. Every one of these entries queues in the offline outbox and syncs later without double-counting.
• Made an error? Reverse, do not delete and pretend. A reversal keeps the row in history but zeroes its effect, so your books stay auditable.

Record the desk as it really works

Five money directions, one entry screen, zero mental arithmetic. Open your POS space and let the transaction types carry the logic at gazeloft.com.