Industry · Electronics & phone shop
POS for a phone and electronics shop in Kenya
In a phone shop, stock is not a quantity — it is a list of individual objects. Six Samsung A15s on the shelf are six different phones with six IMEIs, and the difference matters the moment one comes back under warranty, one is on consignment from a supplier, and one cannot be found.
A till that only counts quantities cannot answer the questions this trade actually gets asked. Which unit did we sell to that customer? Is this handset still in warranty? Whose stock is this, ours or the distributor's? Are we short one A15, and if so, which one? Shops end up keeping an IMEI book beside the till, which is both the workaround and the problem.
What solves it
Serialised units and IMEI tracking
Each handset is an individual unit with its own IMEI or serial, received, sold and returned as itself rather than as one of six.
Warranty by unit
The warranty runs from the date that specific unit was sold, to the customer it was sold to. A claim is a lookup, not an argument about receipts.
Consignment stock, settled
Hold a distributor's stock without owning it, settle only what sold, and write off what did not — with the ownership visible throughout.
High-value write-offs on the record
A damaged or stolen handset is written off against a reason and a person, and it hits the profit and loss rather than vanishing from the stock count.
Manager-gated discounts
Margin on handsets is thin and negotiable, which is exactly why a discount should need a PIN and carry the name of whoever gave it.
A worked example: the warranty claim
A customer walks in with a Samsung A15 bought eleven months ago, a cracked charging port, and no receipt. On a quantity-only system this is a negotiation: the shop cannot prove when the phone was sold, at what price, or whether it was sold here at all.
With serialised stock it is a lookup. The IMEI resolves to the specific unit, the date it was sold, the customer it was sold to, the price, and the warranty window it sits inside. Eleven months is inside a twelve-month warranty, so the claim is honoured — and it is honoured on evidence rather than on the customer's insistence.
The same record settles the harder cases. A handset that turns out to have been sold by another branch still resolves, because units belong to the business and not to a till. A handset that was never received into stock at all is immediately visible as such, which is the difference between refusing a claim and accusing a customer of something. And when the replacement goes out, it goes out as its own serialised unit with its own warranty starting today.
- →IMEI resolves to unit, date, customer, price and warranty window
- →Cross-branch sales resolve because units belong to the business
- →Units never received are distinguishable from units sold elsewhere
- →The replacement carries its own warranty from today
The features this trade leans on
Each one goes deeper than this page does — start with the first.
Stock you can trust
Batch and expiry, serial numbers, reorder levels, stock takes and the formulas behind them.
Selling at the counter
Split payments, held orders, manager-gated discounts and a drawer count that reconciles.
Customers and loyalty
Credit accounts that do not go missing, loyalty that returns, and a debtor list you can actually chase.
Reports and real accounting
Double-entry books — trial balance, P&L, balance sheet — not a CSV export to somebody else's software.
Questions from this trade
Can I track phones by IMEI?
Yes. Handsets are serialised units rather than a quantity, so each one is received, sold and returned as itself. Scanning or entering the IMEI resolves to that specific unit, its sale date, its price and the customer who bought it.
How does warranty work if the customer has no receipt?
The IMEI is the receipt. Because the unit's sale date and customer are on the record, the warranty window is a lookup rather than a dispute, and a claim can be honoured or declined on evidence.
Can I hold consignment stock from a distributor?
Yes. Consignment stock sits in your shop without being your inventory, so it does not overstate what you own. When a unit sells you settle for that unit; what does not sell can be written off or returned, with the ownership clear the whole way through.
What happens when a high-value item is damaged or stolen?
It is written off against a reason and an authorising staff member, and the write-off posts to the profit and loss. That is the important part: a KES 30,000 handset that simply disappears from a stock count is a loss you never see, and one that is written off is a loss you can investigate.
Can I stop staff discounting handsets?
Yes. Discounts sit behind a manager PIN and record who authorised them. On thin-margin electronics this matters more than almost anywhere else, because a 5% discount given away casually is often most of the margin on the unit.
Can I use it for more than one shop?
Yes. Branches share one product catalogue but hold their own stock, so a transfer between them is a recorded movement rather than a re-count. Reports run per branch or across all of them, and staff permissions are set per branch — a Kisumu supervisor does not need to see Nairobi's margins.
Will it show me my profit?
Yes, and from a real ledger rather than a sales total. Every sale posts to a double-entry chart of accounts, so you get a trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow — not a CSV to hand your accountant. Margin is visible per product, per branch and per channel, because cost is tracked on the way in through purchase orders and goods-received notes.
Can I stop staff from giving discounts or deleting sales?
Yes. Discounts, voids and refunds sit behind a manager PIN, and every one of them records who authorised it and when. Staff accounts carry role permissions, so a cashier can sell without seeing cost prices, editing products or opening reports. A void that reverses stock is a movement in the audit trail, not a gap in it.
Try it in your electronics & phone shop
Fourteen days, no card, no hardware to buy. Import your product list or let Amina build it from a photo of your price list.