Running a business blindfolded
Until now, Jacana supported 963 small-scale hard-working entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs have all received training in business, financial and marketing planning. Part of the financial training is calculating the cost price of your products or services. During that session, participants sometimes found out that they had been selling their best-run product below cost price for years.
Real example of a shop owner who’s best selling products were eggs:
“I always felt that I made a good profit on selling my eggs. I bought my eggs for 1 Kwacha and sold them for 1.5 Kwacha. But still had to borrow money every semester to send my children to school.”
“After the training, I understood that the purchase price of eggs is only part of the cost and that I did not include transport and rent, for example. All these years, I made a loss on every sold egg.”
Our trainers notice that no one keeps any kind of financial records and everybody runs their business blind.
One of the components of the training is keeping simple financial books on paper (download free manual).
“This is not going to happen to me again: From now on, I’m going to keep my accounts, even though I find it boring.”
However, paper does not generate reports and it is very difficult to learn from it. To be honest, many of the entrepreneurs trained by Jacana gave up paper-based accounting after a few months.
“Too much work, calculation errors; I don’t learn anything that way.”
Super Simple Bookkeeping app
More and more small-scale business owners have a cheap SMART phone. Jacana saw an opportunity and started looking for a simple app to keep accounts. Some of these were tested with a small group of entrepreneurs and it soon became clear that the existing apps were too complicated or confusing.
Together, we got a good idea of how a useful accounting app should look like.
Eventually, Jacana developed the “Super Simple Bookkeeping” app, which offers the following advantages:
- During sales, you often have to multiply. That went wrong quite often, the app now does that for you as you automatically enter the data into the accounting system.
- You hardly need to type because you can use lists of products and services.
- Finally, you can see at one glance which part of your business is doing well and which is doing less.
- You get insight into cash flow and profit/loss.
- You don’t need an internet connection.
- Help is available.
Jacana’s “Super Simple Bookkeeping” app is 100% free and contains no advertising.
For now, it is only available on Android, as there are hardly any African small-scale business owners with iPhones.
2024 New year’s resolution:
Yes, bookkeeping is boring and it is painful to learn that you might have been working so hard for many years without realizing that your efforts did not translate in profit. Let’s change that.
Work smart and hard.
Start recording your financial transactions just to personally learn from it and make smart business decisions.
Questions and remarks are always welcome, just use the chat function at the right bottom of this page.
Whishing you a prosporos and profitable 2024,
The Jacana team