A corner shop

A shop's money is mostly sitting on its own shelves. Everything here is a way of seeing where.

Nothing here costs money. Everything here is done on a phone.

1. Find the slow stock

Walk your shelves once, with a notebook, and mark anything you are fairly sure has not moved in a month. Write down what each of those cost you, and add it up.

That total is money you have already spent that is doing nothing — and it is nearly always larger than people expect. Clear it: discount it, bundle it with something that does move, or put it where people actually look. Then stop reordering it out of habit, which is how it got there.

Do this once a quarter. It takes an hour and it is the fastest hour in the shop.

2. Know before you run out, not after

Pick your fifteen fastest-moving items — the ones people come in specifically for. For those only, note the stock you have left at the end of each week. Fifteen lines, once a week, four minutes.

Running out of a fast item costs you twice: the sale, and the customer who walks to the next shop and finds it perfectly fine there.

After a month, type those notes into Claude — a free AI assistant you open in a phone browser — and ask:

These are my weekly closing stock counts for fifteen items over four weeks. Which are running down fastest, and when should I reorder each one?

It is arithmetic on your own numbers, which is what these tools are genuinely reliable for.

3. Check your suppliers against each other

For your top ten items, write down what each distributor charges you, and what the scheme actually works out to once you account for the free stock and the credit period. Do it for two or three suppliers on the same items.

Schemes are designed to be hard to compare — that is the point of them. "One free with twelve" and "eight per cent off" and "thirty days credit" are three different things wearing the same clothes.

You can put all three offers to Claude as plainly as you like and ask which is actually cheaper per unit. Then check the answer against one item you can work out in your head, so you know it did the sum the way you meant.

Even when you stay with the same supplier, knowing the number changes what you can ask for.

4. Keep the credit book readable

If you give udhaar, keep one line per entry, always the same four things: date, name, amount, and whether it has been paid.

Photograph the pages every week. A book that gets lost, soaked or torn is a month of your own money gone, and there is no way to reconstruct it.

You can type out the outstanding entries and ask Claude to total them by name. Check it against the book yourself before you act on it. This is your money and, more delicately, your relationships with people who live on your street — a confident wrong total is worse here than no total at all.

Watch out for

• Calls about your QR code, your settlement, or a "pending payment". Open the payment app directly. Never follow a link that arrived by message.
• An OTP. There is no legitimate reason for anyone to ask you for one, ever.
• Anyone creating urgency. That is the tell, in every one of these. Put the phone down and call back on a number you already had.

If you try one thing

Do the slow-stock walk. One hour, once, and it usually finds more money standing on your shelves than the rest of this page will earn you in a month.