Documentation

Create a business account from the dashboard sign-up screen with your business name, country, and your own name/email/password. This sets up your business straight away with a Main Warehouse and Main Store location, a protected Retail price tier, and a Tenant Admin role (full access) assigned to you — you're signed in immediately, no separate activation step.

From there, the usual first steps are: add your real items and stock them at your warehouse (see Items & stock), invite any staff who need access (Employees & roles), and connect a payment method if you plan to take card or mobile money payments (Payments).

Every location is one of two types, and the type changes what you can do there:

• Warehouse — where new items are created and first stocked. This is the only place you can add a brand-new item to your catalog.
• Storefront — where you sell. Storefronts receive stock via transfers from a warehouse (or restocks directly, if you stock a storefront on its own); they don't create new items themselves.

You can add as many locations of either type as your business needs from Locations in the dashboard, and assign staff to specific locations so they only see and act on stock at the place they actually work (see Employees & roles).

Add a new item from a Warehouse location's item list: give it a name, category, buying price, and a starting quantity — every item is stocked at the location it's created at right away. Soko automatically assigns each item a unique, scannable barcode (EAN-13); open any item and tap/click Print label or Share label to get a printable or shareable barcode image for the physical product.

Items can be sold in more than one packaging unit — for example a single Unit, a Pack of 6, and a Carton of 24 — each with its own conversion back to the base unit and its own price per price tier. Set prices per unit per tier from the item's own detail view, or use Regenerate suggested prices to auto-fill from your markup percentage.

Stock quantity only ever changes through one of these actions, every one of which is recorded:

• Restock — add newly received stock, with a buying price and optional expiry date/batch.
• Adjust — a signed correction (+ or −) with a reason, for miscounts, damage, or write-offs that aren't a sale or transfer.
• Sales, orders, and transfers — stock leaves automatically when a POS sale completes, an order is delivered, or a transfer ships.

Every item keeps a full History — open the item and tap/click History to see every stock movement and catalog change (who did it, when, and what changed), in one combined timeline. A sold-out item (zero on hand) still shows up in your item list rather than disappearing — you'll need to see it to restock it.

Add staff from Employees with a name, email or phone, and a role. Every role beyond the built-in Tenant Admin is one you define yourself under Roles — pick exactly which permissions (viewing stock, taking sales, managing customers, and so on) that role should have. An employee can optionally be assigned to one or more specific locations; if they have no assignment they can act at every location their permissions allow.

The Tenant Admin role is protected: it always has every permission, it never appears as a choice when adding a new employee, and an employee holding it can never be deactivated, reassigned, or released by anyone — there must always be at least one person with full access to the business.

Staff sign in with either their email or phone number and password, from the dashboard (web) or the Soko mobile app — both give the same access, gated by the same role/permissions.

A Customer is priced by price tier — create tiers under Pricing (every tenant starts with a default Retail tier) and assign each customer to one from the Customers page; every price they see, in POS, Orders, or the customer app, comes from that tier. Customers also accumulate loyalty points and can hold store credit, both editable from their own record.

A Supplier is who you buy from. Add one under Suppliers, then use Procurement to raise a purchase order, track it through acknowledgment and delivery, and receive the stock straight into a warehouse — receiving a purchase order is itself a restock, so it shows up in that item's history too. Suppliers can also self-register their own login to view and acknowledge orders you've sent them directly.

POS is for immediate, walk-in sales at a storefront. Open a till session for the day, add items to the sale (priced at whichever price tier the sale is rung up under), take payment, and close the till at the end of the session to reconcile cash and card/mobile-money totals against what the system recorded.

A POS sale is intentionally separate from an Order (see below) — POS is cash-register-style, one sale, paid immediately; Orders are for a customer being invoiced, possibly paid later or in installments.

POS itself never records a return — every return goes through the invoice it was originally sold on (Orders & invoicing, below), so it's always tied to what was actually sold rather than a free-standing entry with no history behind it.

An employee can take an order for a customer at a storefront from Orders, or a customer can place one themselves through the marketplace or mobile app. Every order lands on an invoice — if the customer already has an unpaid (open) invoice, a new order adds to it rather than starting a separate bill, so a customer can build up one running invoice across several visits or online orders before paying.

An order still Placed and its invoice still Open can have its lines edited or removed by staff (or, for a single line, by the customer themselves if they ordered the wrong thing) — once approved or paid, changes go through a Return and/or Refund instead. A return is raised against the specific line on that invoice and reduces what the invoice totals to as soon as the item is marked back in stock; a refund only becomes available once that happens, and repays exactly what the returned item was worth — never a free-typed amount.

Invoices can be paid by cash/manual confirmation, or, once you've connected a gateway (see Payments), by card or mobile money directly. Send an invoice or receipt straight to a customer by email or WhatsApp from the invoice itself.

Transfers move stock between two of your own locations (typically warehouse → storefront) — request, approve, ship, and receive, with stock leaving the source and arriving at the destination only once each step actually happens, not the moment it's requested. Fulfillment covers preparing and delivering online/marketplace orders from a warehouse rather than a walk-in storefront pickup.

The Dashboard is your at-a-glance home screen, showing:

• All time: current inventory value (what's on the shelves worth, at cost) and lifetime sales/gross profit.
• Last 30 days: revenue, gross and net profit, low-stock alerts, a sales trend chart, and your top-selling items.
• Bank account balances across every payment method you've set up.

For a deeper breakdown, Profit & Loss lets you group any date range by item, location, or day. End of day shows what came in today by payment method and reconciles it against a cashier's counted till cash. Payments is the full ledger — every payment and refund processed, POS or invoice, over any date range, with totals by method. A returned item is deducted from revenue and profit the moment it's marked back in stock, everywhere these figures appear.

Connect Stripe, Paystack, Flutterwave, Hubtel, or GoCardless from Settings → Payment gateways to accept card or mobile money payments directly into your own account — Soko never holds your customers' money. Only one gateway is active at a time; whichever one is active is what customers see as a payment option on invoices, in the marketplace, and in the mobile app.

Customers can shop with you two ways: your public page on the Soko marketplace (browse, order, and pay from a browser — no account needed to browse, an account to check out), or the Soko mobile app, which they can also use to scan your storefront's QR code to jump straight to your store. Either way, they see your live stock and their own price tier's pricing, can place orders, view and pay invoices, and message you directly.

In the mobile app specifically, a customer can scan an item's barcode to jump straight to it while browsing, and manage their own account (name, email, phone, and photo) from Account.

Everything staff can do on the dashboard — Stock, Items, POS, Orders, Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Reports, and more — is also available in the Soko mobile app, gated by the exact same role/permissions. It's the same account, the same data, live — a restock logged on a phone at the warehouse shows up on the dashboard (and vice versa) as soon as either side refreshes.

Message a customer or supplier directly from their record, or raise a support ticket with the Soko team from within the dashboard for anything account- or billing-related. For anything not covered here, reach us at support@sokotally.com.