Selling Scrap to a Buyer: When Profit Appears in Gazeloft

The pain: feeling rich while going broke

Here is the most dangerous illusion in the scrap trade. You spend three weeks buying PET at ₦150 per kg. Your yard fills up. Your pile looks like money, so you spend like the money already arrived. Then the Buyer's truck comes, the price has softened to ₦210, the load weighs less than you guessed, and after loading costs you discover the "profit" you already spent never existed.

The opposite mistake is just as common. Some dealers think they are barely surviving because their cash keeps shrinking, when in truth they are sitting on excellent stock bought at great prices. Without a system that separates money out from profit earned, you are always either too confident or too afraid.

What the Sell Waste Product flow is, and the rule behind it

Gazeloft's Recycling space enforces one honest rule: no profit until sold. When you buy waste, the dashboard records money out and stock in, and profit stays exactly where it should be: at zero. Nothing about a purchase makes you richer yet.

Profit is created by the Sell Waste Product flow, the second half of the same entry modal you use for buying. A Sell entry captures:

• The material you are selling from stock.
• The kilos on the Buyer's scale.
• The Buyer, the company or aggregator taking the load. In Gazeloft, the party you sell to is always called a Buyer, never anything else.
• The price per kg the Buyer is paying, with the amount calculated as kg times price.

The moment you save a Sell entry, Gazeloft computes your margin: the difference between what you paid per kg for that material and what the Buyer paid you. That margin, spread across the kilos sold, is your profit, and only now does it appear on your dashboard and in your insights.

Step by step: recording a sale in the app

1. Open the Recycling space and tap the entry button.
2. Choose Sell Waste Product.
3. Pick the material, for example PET bottles.
4. Enter the kilos from the Buyer's weighbridge or scale, for example 1,850 kg. Always use the weight you are actually being paid on.
5. Enter the price per kg the Buyer agreed, for example ₦250.
6. Select the Buyer, or create a new Buyer record with the company name and contact.
7. Confirm the amount (₦462,500 here) and how you were paid, then save.

If the Buyer pays by transfer, your cash-in-bank rises. If they pay cash, cash-at-hand rises. If they will pay later, record it as debt owed to you and clear it with partial repayments as the transfers land.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

Sales often happen on paper-heavy days, with waybills and weighbridge tickets. On gazeloft.com you can sit down after loading, open the same Sell Waste Product modal, and enter the sale with the ticket in front of you. Use the date field to backdate if you are entering the day after collection, so the sale sits on the correct day in your reports.

Understand the gap between bought kilos and sold kilos

One number surprises every dealer the first time they sell through Gazeloft: the difference between the kilos you accumulated and the kilos the Buyer pays for. You recorded 1,900 kg of PET going into the pile, but the weighbridge says 1,850 kg. That 50 kg gap is shrinkage, and it has ordinary causes: moisture drying out, sand and dirt shaken loose, caps and labels removed, small spillage during storage and loading. Before proper records, shrinkage hides inside the general confusion. With records, it becomes a percentage you can watch and manage. If your PET consistently loses 2 to 3 percent, that is the physics of the material and you simply price it into your buying. If one month the gap jumps to 8 percent, something changed: wetter material accepted at the scale, a storage leak, or kilos leaving the yard in ways you should investigate. Either way, the Sell entry against your buy history is what makes the gap visible at all. Sellers who never compare the two sides are paying for phantom kilos every single load and calling it bad luck.

A worked example: the day profit finally shows

Amaka has been buying PET for a month:

• Total bought: 1,900 kg at an average of ₦152 per kg, costing ₦288,800.
• Her dashboard all month: money out ₦288,800, PET stock 1,900 kg, profit ₦0.

Her Buyer, a Lagos aggregator, collects 1,850 kg (some moisture and dirt loss) at ₦250 per kg:

• Sale amount: 1,850 x ₦250 = ₦462,500, paid by transfer, so cash-in-bank rises by ₦462,500.
• Margin: roughly ₦98 per kg between her average cost and the sale price.
• Profit now visible: about ₦181,300 on the kilos sold.

For a whole month the app told Amaka the truth: you have spent, you have stock, you have earned nothing yet. On collection day it told her a better truth: this load made ₦181,300. She can now decide calmly what to reinvest, what to save, and what to pay herself, based on profit that actually exists.

Tips and pitfalls

• Sell on the Buyer's weight, record the Buyer's weight. The kilos you get paid for are the kilos that matter. The gap between what you bought and what you sold is real shrinkage: moisture, dirt, spillage. Seeing it teaches you to buy drier, cleaner material.
• Do not spend stock, spend profit. Until the Sell entry exists, treat your pile as cost, not wealth. The zero on your profit line is protecting you.
• Record every sale the same day or backdate precisely. A sale entered on the wrong day distorts your best-day insights.
• Compare Buyers with numbers. After a few sales, your history shows exactly what each Buyer paid per kg and how they paid. Loyalty to a Buyer should be earned with price and prompt payment.
• Watch price movements. If Buyers drop from ₦250 to ₦220, your margin per kg falls from about ₦100 to ₦70, and your buying price may need to follow.

Let profit be real, not imagined

The scrap business rewards patience and punishes wishful thinking. Gazeloft keeps profit at zero until a Buyer actually pays, then shows your margin to the naira. Record your next sale properly and see what your load really earned, at gazeloft.com.