Feature · Purchasing
Purchase orders, suppliers and goods received
Buying is where margin is actually decided, and it is the part most Kenyan shops run on WhatsApp. You message the supplier, a lorry arrives, somebody counts most of it, and the invoice is paid a fortnight later from memory. The gap between what you ordered, what arrived and what you were billed is where money disappears — quietly, and in both directions.
sell.ke closes that loop. A purchase order says what you asked for at what price. A goods-received note records what actually turned up. The difference is visible immediately, before you pay, and the cost that lands on the product is the cost you were really charged — which is the figure every margin report downstream depends on.
What this actually does
Purchase orders
An agreed quantity at an agreed price, on the record, before the lorry leaves. Disputes become a comparison rather than an argument.
Goods-received notes
Receive against the order and short deliveries surface at the gate, not at the stock take three months later.
Cartons in, pieces out
Buy a carton of 24 and sell singles: the conversion factor lives on the product, so one receipt of stock becomes the right number of sellable units.
Supplier bills and payments
What you owe each supplier is a ledger position, so a part-payment leaves a balance rather than a note on the invoice.
Approvals before commitment
Larger orders can require sign-off, which is how a branch manager stops being able to commit the business alone.
Reorder levels that fire
Low-stock alerts against a set reorder point, so buying is prompted by the shelf rather than by a customer asking for something you do not have.
Landed cost on the product
The cost captured here is what the P&L uses. Get it wrong and every margin figure in the business is wrong with it.
The short delivery you are already absorbing
Take a wholesaler ordering 200 cartons at KES 1,200 and being delivered 194. Nobody is necessarily stealing — a pallet was miscounted, a carton was damaged, the loader was rushed. But the invoice says 200, and without a receiving record against the order, it gets paid. That is KES 7,200 gone on one delivery.
Repeat that at 2% across a business buying KES 4,000,000 of stock a year and it is KES 80,000 — considerably more than the software costs. The fix is not vigilance, which does not scale; it is a receiving step that compares what arrived to what was ordered and makes the difference someone's decision to accept.
Cartons in, pieces out
Almost every Kenyan retailer buys in one unit and sells in another. A carton of 24 sodas, a bale of 50 exercise books, a sack of maize sold by the kilo. The system has to hold both units and the factor between them, or the shop ends up keeping stock in cartons and guessing at singles.
Holding the conversion on the product means a receipt of 10 cartons becomes 240 sellable units in one movement, the stock take can be counted in whichever unit is practical, and the cost per piece is derived rather than estimated. It is unglamorous and it is the difference between a stock figure you trust and one you override.
- →Buy in cartons or bales, sell in pieces, kilos or metres
- →Cost per sellable unit derived from the purchase price
- →Reorder levels expressed in the unit you actually count
Where this decides the sale
The trades this matters most to, and what they need from it.
Purchase orders, suppliers and goods received — questions
What is a goods-received note and why does it matter?
It is the record of what a supplier actually delivered, entered against the purchase order that requested it. It matters because it is the only point at which a short or damaged delivery is cheap to catch. Without it, the gap between the order and the delivery is discovered at the stock take, by which time it is indistinguishable from theft or miscounting.
Can I buy in cartons and sell in single units?
Yes. The conversion factor is held on the product, so receiving 10 cartons of 24 adds 240 sellable units and the cost per unit is derived from the carton price. You can count stock in whichever unit is practical.
Does it track what I owe suppliers?
Yes. Supplier bills and payments post to accounts payable in the same ledger as your sales, so a part-payment leaves a running balance and the cash flow statement reflects what is actually due.
Can I require approval for large purchase orders?
Yes. Orders above a threshold can require sign-off before they commit the business, which matters most in multi-branch operations where a branch manager would otherwise be able to order stock alone.
How does purchasing affect my profit figures?
Directly, and more than anything else. The cost recorded when stock is received is the cost of goods sold in the profit and loss. A business that does not capture cost on the way in cannot report margin — only revenue.
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.
What does it cost?
Plans run from KES 1,499/month for a single-branch till to KES 14,999/month for unlimited scale, with the online shop, M-Pesa checkout and KRA eTIMS receipts included from KES 2,999/month. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial and no card. There is no hardware to buy — sell.ke runs on a phone, tablet or laptop you already own.
Read next
Stock you can trust
Batch and expiry, serial numbers, reorder levels, stock takes and the formulas behind them.
Reports and real accounting
Double-entry books — trial balance, P&L, balance sheet — not a CSV export to somebody else's software.
Branches, staff and control
Shared catalogue, separate stock, transfers that are movements, and permissions per branch.
See it on your own products
Fourteen days, no card. Import your product list or let Amina build it from a photo of your price list, and run it alongside whatever you use now.