How to Set Up Your Gas Refill Business in Gazeloft Today

The pain: a busy tank and an empty notebook

If you run a cooking gas station in Nigeria, your day probably looks like this. Customers arrive with 3kg, 6kg and 12.5kg cylinders from morning till night. You weigh, you fill, you collect cash or a transfer, and you move to the next person. Somewhere in the middle of that rush you are supposed to write down every sale in a notebook, remember what the last bulk refill cost you, and keep track of who is owing you.

Most sellers cannot keep up. The notebook has gaps. The refill invoice from the depot is in a drawer somewhere. When someone asks "how is the gas business going?" the honest answer is often "the money is moving, but I am not sure where it is going."

Gazeloft's Gas space fixes this with about two minutes of recording per day. This article shows you exactly how to set it up, from download to your first recorded sale.

What the Gas space is

Gazeloft is a sales, expense and profit tracker for everyday African businesses. Inside it you create a "space" for each business you run, and the Gas space is built specifically for cooking gas and LPG refill stations. It understands the things that make gas different from a provision shop:

• You buy in bulk refills (a batch of kg at a known cost) and sell in small quantities per kg.
• Your cost price changes almost every time you restock, so profit must be calculated per batch, not from one guessed average.
• Gas can leak, evaporate or be stolen, so the app needs an honest way to record shortages.
• Cash moves between your hand and your bank account all day, so you need a cash ledger, not just a sales list.

The Free plan gives you one space and a 30-day trial, no card needed, so a single gas station can start today at zero cost. The app works on Android and iOS, there is a web dashboard at gazeloft.com for when you want a bigger screen, and everything works offline and syncs automatically when your network returns.

Step by step: setting up in the app

1. Download and sign up. Install Gazeloft from the Play Store or App Store, or open gazeloft.com in a browser. Sign up with your email or Google account. There is no card required and email verification is optional, so you are inside in under a minute.
2. Create your Gas space. Tap to create a new space and choose the Gas type from the picker. Give it a real name, for example "Mama Ijeoma Gas, Aba Road". If you run more than one station, each one becomes its own space on the Plus or Business plan.
3. Set your gas prices. Open the gas price settings and enter your current selling price per kg. If you sell more than one product, for example LPG refills plus accessories like burners and hoses, set each product up so sales are recorded against the right item.
4. Record your opening stock as a refill. This is the important one. Whatever gas is in your tank right now, record it as your first refill batch: the number of kg and what it cost you. If you honestly cannot remember the exact cost, use the best figure from your last depot invoice. From this point forward Gazeloft tracks every kg in and out.
5. Add your opening cash. Use Add Fund to record the cash you currently hold for the business, tagged as cash at hand or cash in bank. Now your dashboard mirrors reality from day one.
6. Log your first sale. When the next customer fills a 12.5kg cylinder, open the sale entry, enter the kg, confirm the price, choose cash or transfer, and save. That is it. Your dashboard updates instantly with revenue, cost and profit.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

The web dashboard at gazeloft.com mirrors the app. Log in with the same account, select your Gas space from the switcher, and you will see the same dashboard: the profit hero at the top, cash at hand and cash in bank, and your latest transactions. Setup tasks like price settings, refills and Add Fund all exist on the web too, so if you prefer typing on a laptop in the evening, everything you do there appears on your phone immediately.

A worked example with real numbers

Meet Chinedu, who runs a small gas station in Enugu. On the day he joins Gazeloft:

• His storage tank holds roughly 180kg of gas. His last bulk refill was 500kg at ₦1,150 per kg, so he records his opening stock as a 180kg batch at ₦1,150 per kg, a cost of ₦207,000.
• He sells at ₦1,400 per kg, so he sets that as his gas price.
• He has ₦46,500 cash in the drawer and ₦120,000 in his business bank account, recorded with two Add Fund entries.

His first recorded customer fills a 12.5kg cylinder: 12.5kg at ₦1,400 = ₦17,500 collected in cash. Gazeloft automatically takes the cost from his open batch: 12.5kg at ₦1,150 = ₦14,375. Profit on that one sale: ₦3,125. His cash at hand rises to ₦64,000, his stock drops to 167.5kg, and his profit hero for the day reads ₦3,125. For the first time, Chinedu can see the actual margin on a single cylinder, not a guess.

By the end of the first day he has logged 14 sales totalling 96kg, revenue of ₦134,400, cost of ₦110,400 and a clean profit figure of ₦24,000. It took him under three minutes of tapping, spread across the day.

Tips and pitfalls

• Record the refill before the sales. Gazeloft has a hard stock guard: it will not let you sell more kg than your recorded stock holds. If you forget to enter a refill, the app will stop you mid-sale, which is a helpful reminder but an annoying one at 8am.
• Use your real numbers, not round guesses. The whole value of the Gas space is honest per-batch profit. If your refill cost ₦1,148 per kg, enter ₦1,148.
• Do not skip the opening cash entry. Without it, the cash ledger will drift away from what is in your drawer and you will stop trusting it.
• Turn on the daily reminder. Gazeloft can nudge you once a day to record. In a rushed trade like gas, that nudge is what keeps the record complete.
• Add your workers properly. If an attendant sells for you, invite them as a worker with their own login and per-space permissions, rather than sharing your owner account.

Start today

Your tank is already full of money you cannot see. Create your Gas space, record one refill and one sale, and watch the profit line appear. It is free to start and there is no card needed. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.