Why Gas and Fuel Sellers Need Gazeloft: The Story of the Missing 40kg

Ikenna sells cooking gas on a busy road in Aba. He has done it for six years, he knows his customers by cylinder size, and if you ask him his margin he will tell you without pausing: "I buy at ₦1,150, I sell at ₦1,400, so I make ₦250 on every kilo."

In March he refilled 2,000kg. He sold gas every single day. At the end of the month he expected roughly ₦500,000 of gross profit. What he actually had, after expenses he considered normal, was less than half of it. Nothing had been stolen. Nobody had run away with money. He simply could not explain it.

The first thing the numbers showed

He started recording properly. Each refill went in as its own batch with its own cost, not one remembered figure. Within three weeks the first surprise appeared, and it was not dramatic. It was arithmetic.

His 2,000kg had not come in at ₦1,150. It came in three deliveries: 800kg at ₦1,080, 700kg at ₦1,150, and 500kg at ₦1,240. His "₦1,150" was the middle one, the one he happened to remember. Every sale he had made from the last delivery was earning ₦160 per kilogram, not ₦250, and he had been pricing and planning as though nothing had changed.

That is what a single averaged cost does to a trade where the depot price moves. It flatters your bad batches and punishes your good ones, and it does it silently. Costing each sale against the refill it actually came from fixed that number permanently.

Then the tank was measured

The second surprise was bigger. When Ikenna finally did an honest stocktake, the records said he should have 214kg left. The tank held 174kg.

Forty kilograms. At what it had cost him, ₦45,600 gone, roughly a week of profit, and it had left no trace anywhere. No sale, no entry, no argument, nothing to point at.

This is the part gas sellers rarely say out loud, because it sounds like an accusation against staff. Usually it is not. Gas leaves in ordinary ways: a hose seal that weeps, a scale reading a little generously, a cylinder topped up "small extra" as a favour to a regular, an evening sale during a power cut that nobody wrote down. Each one is trivial. Together they are a week's work.

What honest software does with a shortage

There are two ways to handle that 40kg, and the difference matters more than any other decision in this app.

The dishonest way, which many spreadsheets do by accident, is to spread the loss across the remaining gas. Your cost per kilogram quietly rises, your margin quietly falls, and the shortage disappears into your prices where you will never see it again.

Gazeloft does the opposite. A stocktake shortage is booked at its full cost, pinned to the refill it came from, and shown as stock loss. Your remaining gas is not repriced, and the shortage is not quietly subtracted from your headline profit either. It stands there as its own number, with a date and a batch attached to it.

That is uncomfortable by design. A loss you can see is a loss you can chase.

What he did about it

Ikenna checked the obvious things. The hose was fine. The scale was not: against a test weight it was reading light in his customers' favour by a small amount on every fill. Small amount, forty or fifty fills a day, thirty days.

He had the scale fixed. He also started recording every sale as it happened instead of at the end of the day, because the evening reconstruction was where the unrecorded sales were disappearing. April's stocktake was short by 4kg, not 40kg.

He did not become a better trader in a month. He just stopped losing money he could not see.

The report that ended the argument with himself

The habit that stuck was the Refills report. Each refill he buys appears as its own line: what it cost, what it earned, what went missing against it, and what it truly left him. A good month can no longer hide a bad batch, and a bad month can no longer make him doubt a good one.

Alongside it the space handles the rest of the trade without ceremony. Stock drops as he sells and the stock guard refuses a sale that the tank cannot support, so nobody can record gas that does not exist. Cash at hand and cash in bank each have their own running balance. Customers who buy on credit are tracked as debtors. Expenses and suppliers sit in the same place as the sales, which is the only way a profit figure means anything.

The measure you can defend

There is a quieter benefit that Ikenna mentions before he mentions the money. A customer once accused him of short-filling a 12.5kg cylinder. Before, that would have been his word against theirs and a lost customer either way. Now the fill is a record: the kilograms, the price, the time. He showed it. The customer still buys from him.

Selling by weight puts you under an obligation to be exact. A verified scale and a written record are how you meet it, and they protect you as much as they protect the buyer.

Start where he started

You do not need to reconstruct history. Record whatever gas is in your tank right now as your opening batch at your best honest cost, record your cash, then record every sale for two weeks. At the end of the second week, measure the tank.

Whatever the gap is, it has been there for years. This is simply the first time you will see it.

Open a free gas space and find your own missing 40kg.