It started with one question nobody could answer
A Nigerian food manufacturing business wanted to know exactly what a production run cost: this batch, these bags of flour, this much sugar, that week's labour, the diesel, and the transport and clearing on the delivery that brought the raw materials in.
The notebooks couldn't answer it. Neither could the spreadsheets. With stock in one file, costs in another and who owes what in a third, the numbers stopped agreeing with each other long before the month ended.
So the business built a tool to find out. It recorded a run with its materials, labour and overheads, and divided the total by what the run produced. Then it added more: an expiry date on every batch, because food expires. Landed cost instead of the invoice price, because transport and clearing cost real money. A list of who owed what, because selling on credit is normal in this market.
That business still runs on it every day, for real batches and real money. When something breaks, the people who built it are the first to feel it, and they fix it.
Maaz Buk is that same book, now open to other Nigerian businesses with the same problem.
| Item | Quantity | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Flour, 50kg | 14 | ₦812,000 |
| Sugar, 50kg | 6 | ₦375,000 |
| Labour, the week | none | ₦168,000 |
| Diesel & power | none | ₦94,500 |
| Transport & clearing | none | ₦61,300 |
- Cartons produced
- 1,240
- Cost per carton
- ₦1,218
Why it matters
Before this figure existed, the cartons were priced on a feel. Some runs were sold under what they cost. Nobody could have told you which ones.
Illustrative figures. The real ones belong to the business that runs on this.
What that origin does to the software
Because it was built inside a working business, a few things about it are different.
It never guesses a cost
When a cost was never entered, the book says cost not recorded. A made-up average would have led a real business to underprice a real batch.Every batch has an expiry date
The first thing it was used for was food, so the expiry date decides which stock is sold next.Landed cost, not the invoice price
Freight, duty and clearing are spread across the goods they brought in. In Nigeria they are a big part of the cost, and leaving them out makes every margin look better than it is.Tapping twice never records twice
Someone once tapped a frozen screen twice on a bad connection, with a customer waiting. Since then, a repeated tap records the sale only once.Staff see only what they need
The business needed a sales assistant who could record sales without seeing costs or margins, so that became a role.
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