How to Set Up Your Scrap Buying Business in Gazeloft

The pain: a cash business with no memory

If you buy scrap or waste for a living, your day looks something like this. You open your yard or send agents out with cash. People walk in with sacks of PET bottles, bags of aluminium cans, bundles of carton. You weigh, you pay, they leave. By evening you have moved tens of thousands of naira through your hands, your stock pile has grown, and your only record might be a few scribbles in a notebook, if you wrote anything at all.

Then the questions start. How much did I actually spend this week? How many kilos of PET do I have? Did that agent return the right change? When my Buyer's truck comes next month, will I even know what my load cost me? Most scrap dealers cannot answer these questions with confidence, and that is exactly where money leaks away: unrecorded buys, forgotten floats, and sales priced without knowing the real cost per kilo.

Gazeloft was built to fix this. The Recycling space is a purpose-built home for scrap and waste buying, and setting it up properly takes less than an evening.

What the Recycling space is

Gazeloft organises your businesses into spaces. A space is a self-contained set of books for one business: its own dashboard, its own cash ledger, its own history and insights. The Recycling space is tuned for waste trading specifically. It understands that you buy material by the kilo from Customers (the people who bring you waste), that you accumulate stock, and that you only make profit when you sell that stock to a Buyer (the company or aggregator that takes your load).

Three ideas shape the whole space:

1. Every entry is by weight. You record the material, the kilos and the price per kg, and Gazeloft calculates the amount as kg times price. No mental arithmetic at the scale.
2. No profit until sold. Buying waste is money out and stock in. Your dashboard will never pretend a purchase made you profit. Profit appears only when you sell, as the margin between what you paid per kg and what your Buyer pays.
3. Cash is tracked like a bank statement. The space keeps a running cash-at-hand and cash-in-bank ledger, so the float in your pocket and the money in your account are always visible.

Step by step: setting up in the app

1. Create your account. Download Gazeloft on Android or iOS, or open the web dashboard, and sign up. The Free plan gives you a full 30-day trial with one space and no card required.
2. Create a Recycling space. Tap to add a new space and choose the Recycling type. Give it a name your team will recognise, for example "Kubwa Scrap Yard".
3. Set up your materials. Add the materials you trade: PET bottles, aluminium cans, carton, HDPE, iron, copper, whatever moves in your yard. For each one, set a default buy price per kg. If you pay ₦150 per kg for PET today, save that. Entries become two taps instead of a typing exercise.
4. Set stock targets. For each material, set a target in kilos, usually the size of a full load your Buyer will collect. If your Buyer takes PET in 2,000 kg loads, set 2,000 kg. The app then shows you how close each pile is to a sellable load.
5. Add your opening cash float. As the owner, use the add cash action to record the money you are starting with. Tag it to hand (physical cash) or bank. This is owner-only, so workers cannot quietly inflate the float.
6. Invite workers if you have them. Add each buying agent or yard assistant as a worker with only the permissions they need. Agents can record buys with the float you give them without ever seeing owner-level controls.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

The web dashboard at gazeloft.com mirrors the app. Log in with the same account, select your Recycling space, and you will find the same Buy and Sell entry flows, the same materials and prices setup, the cash ledger, and full history with filters. Many owners record on the phone during the day and review on a laptop at night. Everything syncs to the same books.

A worked example: opening week

Mama Blessing runs a small collection point in Ibadan. She sets up like this:

• Materials: PET at a default buy price of ₦150 per kg with a 2,000 kg target, aluminium cans at ₦900 per kg with a 300 kg target, carton at ₦70 per kg with a 1,500 kg target.
• Opening float: ₦200,000 added to cash-at-hand, plus ₦150,000 recorded as cash-in-bank.

In her first week she buys 620 kg of PET (₦93,000), 45 kg of cans (₦40,500) and 800 kg of carton (₦56,000). Her dashboard shows ₦189,500 spent, ₦10,500 cash still at hand from the original ₦200,000, and stock progress bars: PET at 31 percent of target, cans at 15 percent, carton at 53 percent. Profit shows zero, and that is correct, because nothing has been sold yet. When her Buyer collects PET at ₦250 per kg in a few weeks, the profit will appear, and it will be real.

Tips and pitfalls

• Record the opening float honestly. If you start with ₦200,000, enter ₦200,000. A wrong opening balance poisons every reconciliation afterwards.
• Do not create one generic "scrap" material. Separate PET from cans from carton. Margins differ wildly per material, and lumping them together hides your best earner.
• Set default prices even if they change weekly. Updating a default takes seconds. Typing the price on every single entry wastes minutes every day and invites typos.
• Use it offline without fear. Scrap yards often sit in poor signal areas. Gazeloft records offline and auto-syncs from its outbox when the network returns, so keep recording at the scale.
• Turn on daily reminders. A nudge each evening to confirm the day is recorded builds the habit that makes every other feature useful.

Start seeing your scrap business clearly

You weigh every sack that enters your yard. It is time to weigh your money with the same seriousness. Set up your Recycling space tonight, add your materials and float, and record tomorrow's first buy properly. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.