How to Set Up Your POS Business in Gazeloft in 10 Minutes

The pain: a busy desk and a blank memory

If you run a POS stand in Lagos, Kano, Aba, Accra or anywhere in between, your day moves fast. A customer withdraws ₦20,000. Another deposits ₦50,000. Someone buys ₦1,000 airtime while a third person is asking you to send ₦35,000 to their brother in Ibadan. By 7 pm you have served eighty people, your drawer is heavy, your phone is full of alerts, and you honestly cannot remember half of what happened.

Most agents cope with a notebook, a jotter, or nothing at all. The notebook gets wet, pages tear, and nobody ever adds up the columns. So the two questions that matter most stay unanswered: how much money is physically in my drawer right now, and how much of everything I am holding is actually mine?

Gazeloft's POS Shop space was built for exactly this desk. It gives you three separate numbers that never mix up: cash-at-hand (the physical notes in your drawer), cash-in-bank (your float sitting in the account behind your terminal), and profit (the charges you keep after your provider takes their cut). This article shows you how to set it up from zero.

What you are setting up

A "space" in Gazeloft is one business. When you create a space and choose the POS Shop type, the app switches on everything a POS desk needs: withdrawal, deposit and transfer entries, bill payments, airtime and data sales, the special withdraw-and-send entry, itemised provider charges, a running cash-at-hand ledger, and a dashboard that shows cash at hand and profit today the moment you open it.

Gazeloft is free to start. The Free plan is a 30-day trial with one space and no card needed, so you can set up your POS stand today and decide later whether you want Plus at ₦1,500 per month for five spaces, profit tracking, customers and loyalty, inventory alerts and insights, or Business at ₦5,000 per month for unlimited spaces plus invoices, receipts and PDF reports.

Step-by-step: setting up in the app

1. Download and sign up. Get Gazeloft on Android or iOS, or open the web dashboard at gazeloft.com in any browser. Sign up with your email or Google. No card, no payment.

2. Create your space. Tap Create Space, give it a name like "Papa sam POS, Ojota", and pick POS Shop as the space type. Choose your currency (Naira by default, but Gazeloft supports multiple currencies and more than 20 languages).

3. Enter your opening balances with Add Fund. This is the step most people skip and then regret. Before you record a single sale, tell Gazeloft what you are starting with. Open the entry menu, choose Add Fund, and record the cash currently in your drawer tagged to hand. Then record another Add Fund for the float in your terminal account tagged to bank. From this moment, every entry you make moves these two numbers exactly the way money moves in real life.

4. Set up your fee presets. Go to the provider fee presets for the space and enter your provider's fee table once: the provider fee bands, debit fee, VAT and stamp duty where they apply. You will thank yourself every single day after this, because recording a transaction becomes a matter of tapping a fee chip instead of typing four numbers.

5. Record your first transaction. When the next customer walks up, tap the transaction type, enter the amount, type the charge you collected (Gazeloft never guesses your charge because street pricing varies), pick how the customer paid and how the charge was paid, and save. Your drawer, float and profit all update instantly.

Step-by-step: on the web dashboard

The web dashboard at gazeloft.com mirrors the app. Log in, select your POS space from the space switcher, and you will see the same dashboard: cash at hand, profit today, and your latest transactions. You can create entries from the web exactly as in the app, which is handy if you prefer typing on a keyboard at the end of the day or you manage the business from home while a worker runs the stand.

Worked example: Sam opens his stand

Sam starts Monday morning with ₦45,000 cash in his drawer and ₦250,000 float in his terminal account.

1. She records Add Fund ₦45,000 tagged to hand. Cash-at-hand: ₦45,000.

2. She records Add Fund ₦250,000 tagged to bank. Cash-in-bank: ₦250,000.

3. His first customer withdraws ₦10,000 and pays a ₦200 charge. Sam records a withdrawal: amount ₦10,000, charge ₦200. Gazeloft moves ₦10,000 out of his drawer (the customer walked away with it) and adds ₦10,200 to his bank (the ₦10,000 plus the charge settle into his account through the terminal). Drawer: ₦35,000. Bank: ₦260,200.

4. The second customer deposits ₦30,000 cash to send to his mother, paying a ₦300 charge in cash. Gazeloft adds ₦30,300 to the drawer and removes ₦30,000 from the bank. Drawer: ₦65,300. Bank: ₦230,200.

Two entries, and already the app knows something Sam's old notebook never did: his drawer holds ₦65,300, his float is ₦230,200, and his profit so far is the charges minus whatever his provider will take, tracked automatically.

Tips and pitfalls

• Do not skip opening balances. If you start recording sales without Add Fund entries, your cash-at-hand will show a strange or negative figure. It still tracks the movement correctly, but the totals only make sense once your starting money is in.

• Cash-at-hand is all-time, not daily. Gazeloft does not reset your drawer to zero at midnight. The number on the dashboard is the actual money that should be in your drawer right now, carried forward day after day. That is the whole point: you can count your drawer any time and compare.

• Type the real charge you collected. If you charged ₦150 instead of your usual ₦100 because the customer withdrew late at night, record ₦150. Gazeloft never auto-fills the customer charge.

• Work offline with confidence. No network at your stand? Gazeloft keeps entries in an offline outbox and syncs them later without ever double-counting, even if you only get network the next day.

• Use quick presets and express mode. For entries you make thirty times a day, presets and repeat-last-entry cut each record down to a few seconds.

Start today

Ten minutes of setup buys you an answer you have never had: exactly how much is in the drawer, exactly how much is in the bank, and exactly what is yours. Create your free POS Shop space now at gazeloft.com.