How to Set Up a General Business Space in Gazeloft

The pain: money goes in, records never start

Most businesses in Nigeria do not fail on day one. They fail quietly, month by month, because nobody wrote anything down from the beginning. You put ₦2,000,000 into a wholesale run of provisions. Your cousin contributes ₦500,000. You buy stock, pay for transport, sell some, restock, lend a customer goods on credit, and six months later somebody asks the simple question: is this business making money? You honestly do not know. The sales feel okay. The pocket feels light. The truth is somewhere in between, and nobody can find it.

The mistake was not laziness. It was starting to trade before starting to record. Once the first few weeks pass unrecorded, the starting point is lost forever, and every later calculation is a guess built on a guess.

What the General Business space is

Gazeloft is a sales, expense and profit tracker for everyday African businesses. It runs on Android, iOS and a web dashboard, it is free to start with no card needed, and it works offline. Inside Gazeloft you create spaces, and each space is one business or one pot of money.

The General Business space is the flexible one. It is not tied to gas, meat, POS or any specific trade. Instead it is a capital-recovery tracker. You tell it how much capital went in, you record income and expenses as they happen, and the headline on your dashboard is always the same question answered in numbers: has the cumulative net of this business caught up with the capital you put in? Until it does, you are still recovering your money. The day it crosses, you are truly in profit.

Step-by-step: setting up in the app

1. Download Gazeloft from the Play Store or App Store, or open the web dashboard at gazeloft.com. Create your account. No card is needed and the free plan gives you a 30-day trial with one space.
2. Tap to create a new space and choose General Business from the space type picker. Give it a real name, for example "Provisions Wholesale" or "Uber Car 1", not just "Business".
3. Set your currency. Gazeloft supports multiple currencies and more than 20 languages, so pick what you actually trade in.
4. Record your capital. This is the most important entry you will ever make. Choose the Invest capital entry type and enter the money you put in, for example ₦2,000,000. If a partner added ₦500,000, record that as a second investment entry. Investments are never treated as income, so this will not fake any profit. It simply sets the bar the business must clear.
5. If the business already existed before today, use the date field to backdate the investment to the day the money actually went in. Gazeloft lets you backdate any entry, and all your reports are keyed to the date the money moved, not the date you typed it.
6. Record your first income with one of the six named income types, such as Sales income, and your first expense with the Expense type and a category.

Step-by-step: on the web dashboard

The web dashboard at gazeloft.com mirrors the app. Log in, select your General Business space from the space list, and you will see the same break-even hero, the same entry buttons and the same history. Many owners enter quick sales on the phone during the day and then sit at a laptop in the evening to review, correct dates and study the insights. Everything syncs to the same records, and if your phone was offline at the market, the entries queue up in the outbox and sync automatically when data returns.

Worked example: Chidinma's wholesale run

Chidinma starts a provisions wholesale business in Onitsha on 3 March.

• 3 March: Invest capital, ₦2,000,000 (her savings).
• 3 March: Invest capital, ₦500,000 (her brother's contribution).
• 5 March: Expense, ₦1,800,000, category stock purchase.
• 5 March: Expense, ₦45,000, category transport.
• 12 March: Sales income, ₦620,000.
• 19 March: Sales income, ₦540,000.
• 26 March: Expense, ₦900,000, restock.
• 31 March: Sales income, ₦480,000.

At the end of March, Gazeloft shows capital deployed of ₦2,500,000, total income of ₦1,640,000, total expenses of ₦2,745,000, and a cumulative net of minus ₦1,105,000. The break-even bar shows she has not yet recovered anything against her ₦2,500,000 capital, which is completely normal in month one because most of the money is sitting as stock. What matters is that from day one, the truth is on one screen. By June, when sales outpace restocking, she will watch that bar climb toward 100 percent and know exactly the day her money comes back.

Tips and pitfalls

• Enter capital first, before any sale. If you skip it, your break-even tracker has nothing to measure against and every number looks better than it really is.
• One space per business. Do not mix the Uber car money with the shop money. On the Plus plan (₦1,500 per month or ₦15,000 per year) you get 5 spaces, and Business (₦5,000 per month or ₦50,000 per year) gives unlimited spaces plus invoices and PDF reports, so you can compare businesses side by side.
• Record on the day it happens, or backdate honestly. Gazeloft's daily record reminders exist for exactly this reason.
• Do not delete mistakes. Use transaction reversal instead. The row stays in your history marked as reversed, but its effect on every total becomes zero. Your books stay honest and complete.
• Use quick presets and repeat last entry for money that arrives the same way every time, like a weekly remittance from a driver.

Start today

Your business already has a true financial story. The only question is whether anyone is writing it down. Create your General Business space, enter your capital, and let the break-even bar tell you the truth from now on. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.