it all started

We have not yet had the experience of opening real stores, so we moved forward by trial and error. We found the premises, went crazy with the rental price, but still took it, bought equipment, goods, and so on. All this flew in three times more expensive than originally expected. We recorded all expenses and purchases in Google spreadsheets, ordered balloons, printed out “giveaways” and set an opening day.

A lot of people came to the opening, and sales were normal! And everything would be fine, but at the end of the working day we tried to figure out what and how much we sold. Although we tried to write down on scraps of paper what we sold, it turned out that we did not write down everything, we could not make out everything, as we wrote in a hurry. And it turned out to be almost unrealistic to calculate how much net profit we received. I needed an accounting software.

We started looking

It seemed to me then that finding a simple accounting system is a five-minute task. Trade has existed in all ages, what is more ancient than trade?

So, the requirements are simple: keep track of how much product is in the store, be able to quickly add sales using a barcode scanner, record various expenses, such as paying for changing rugs in the store. Well, the main thing is to see in some table how much we earned on each sale, per day, week, month. So to speak, the difference between the purchase price and the sale price.

What turned out

And what was my surprise when I could not find anything sensible. More precisely, there is a lot and even a lot of everything: chic proposals for the implementation of a turnkey accounting system for a hundred thousand hryvnias and in just a couple of months, excellent programs with installation on Windows and an interface a la Windows 95. Back to the Future.

I signed up for a lot of different services, but each was better than the last and included millions of features that you can’t figure out without a bottle. Helpful managers called and tried to explain to me what is the difference between the six types of purchase prices, and to explain to me why I entered my purchase price in the wrong column.

Perhaps, to accountants and financiers with a special education, such services seem like paradise and elementary, but I failed. And if I, with my development and business experience, could not figure it out, how can beginners figure it out?

Well, how is it? And how do thousands of small entrepreneurs who sell on Instagram, Viber and other social networks keep records?

It came as a bit of a shock to me that the average retailer who sells physical goods on the Internet or in a couple of physical outlets, in fact, has nothing to keep their records.

Research

My wife and I decided to conduct a small investigation and find out what people keep records of, and whether they keep records at all. To begin with, we made a survey in the most popular business community on Facebook and received more than 100 responses and dozens of comments.

And my theory was confirmed again: the vast majority of ordinary entrepreneurs keep their records in Excel (Microsoft can be proud) and do not use any services and programs.

The second step was to try to contact the owners of trading pages in social networks directly and ask them. I hired a contractor who interviewed over a thousand group and page owners and forwarded their responses to me.

Here the situation turned out to be even more entertaining: Excel was also in the lead in the answers, and a regular paper notebook came across very often. Although larger sellers already featured various accounting programs and services, and that “our accountant is doing this.”

We decided to do it ourselves

To be honest, I didn’t even expect the results of the second survey, but I already started developing a service that we could use primarily for ourselves. Since sales were going on in the store, we, like everyone else, began to use Excel. And even though I tried to make it “convenient”: with formulas, calculations of totals, with the pages “Products”, “Sales”, “Expenses”, but it was all terrible …

For the first MVP version, the tasks were as simple as possible:

  • Know how many goods are in the store, how much they bought them and how much they sell.
  • The ability to keep records of the goods that we sell by “drop” (drop-shipping, selling goods without our own warehouse.).
  • Adding “Sales” to the system is quick and convenient, taking into account the fact that there can be several buyers in the store at the same time. The easiest way to do this is to use a barcode scanner.
  • The ability to record the cost of maintaining the store: rent, salary, Internet, security, and so on.
  • See the real income of the store, taking into account the difference between the purchase price and the sale price, and preferably in the context of sales channels. Since in addition to the physical store, we have a lot of sales through social networks, marketplaces, and so on.
  • At the first opportunity, we began to add our own products to the system and record the first sales.

What we learned in the process

And you know, I’ll probably say it’s banal, but the theoretical approach and practice are completely different substances. I received the most “incredible” feedback about my work from myself, replacing the seller for the day.

It’s one thing when I’m sitting at my computer at home and imagining that it will be convenient to add a product or sale in such and such a way, and it’s quite another thing when I’m standing at the counter or making out a new batch of goods. This is the sky and the earth. And after such “forays into the field” I had to redo everything!

This is probably one of the reasons why most of the services that I tried to test turned out to be unrealistic to use – the creators did not test them themselves in real conditions.

So, for example, we had to completely redesign the window for adding a sale, because in a situation where there are several people in line, filling in even a few fields is too long, everything should be filled in and placed automatically.

As well as it is inconvenient to press the small button “Add sale” from the menu, more precisely, it is inconvenient to press any button at all. The window for adding a sale should appear automatically at the moment of scanning the barcode of the product with all the fields already filled in.

Or when you have five boxes of new goods in front of you that arrived at the store, and you need to enter each product into the system, then any cursor jumping to the wrong field or even a slight slowdown is incredibly infuriating.

What is the result

This is how we started developing our HugeProfit service in March 2020, and almost six months later we began to invite the first beta testers for closed testing. And then there were new challenges. It turned out that some cases that are convenient for our store are not applicable for other sellers. Or what was unnecessary for our goods turned out to be vital for other groups of goods.

A few more months later, we opened free registration in our startup, although we continue to work in beta mode so far. Many sections are still in development and are not even open for testing.

But at the moment, almost 500 people have already registered with us and more than a hundred sellers with paid rates are actively working.

When choosing a payment model and a tariff scale, we proceeded primarily from Ukrainian realities and the possibilities of small entrepreneurs who sell online and in small stores.

Even at the time of searching for a service in which you can keep records for our store, I was struck by the cost of most services: from 800 UAH per month for the weakest tariff with cut functionality, at best 14 days of the test period, and then, please, pay. For me, as for a person who has just opened a store and is still working in the red, paying such amounts monthly would be an unbearable burden. The same goes for most small businesses.

Therefore, in our service, we have made tariffs that depend only on the volume of sales and the number of goods in the system. The more you sell, and therefore more successful, the easier it is for you to pay. As well as a perpetual full-featured free tariff for those who are just starting their business, have just opened their website or started a page for sale and who still have almost no sales, but still need to keep records!

Thanks to our active user, the service is getting better every day. I personally communicate with many in Telegram and try to take into account all the wishes in future updates. And thanks to this feedback and wishes, I know exactly where to go next and that we have chosen the right, necessary and demanded direction.

I am sure that within this year we will already be able to reach the minimum working version! But there is still a lot of work! And resources are still lacking.

We plan to have full-fledged integrations with Ukrainian marketplaces such as Rozetka, Prom.ua and store engines such as WooCommerce, OpenCart for automatic synchronization of goods, fixing sales and accounting for balances.

As well as adapting the system to enter the international market and foreign marketplaces such as Amazon. They sell everything and everywhere! And we have something to offer sellers all over the world!