Management software for a hardware store or building-materials business

A generic till software hits the same six walls in a hardware store: rebar is not one item but eight diameters and five lengths, cement sells by the bag and cable by the metre, contractors pay at thirty days, and the stock is spread between the shop and the depot. Here is what to check before you sign.

Updated 14 August 2026 · 7-minute read · Written by the Kimbea team

1. One reference, several variants

"Rebar" is not an item. It is a family: 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, 25, 32 mm, in lengths of 1 to 6 metres. Each combination has its own stock, its own price and its own code, and the customer asks for "12 in 6 metres", not "some rebar".

Software that does not know variants leaves you two bad options: create forty separate items nobody can find again, or create a single item whose stock figure no longer means anything. You pay for both at stocktake time.

What to demand: variant axes you name yourself (diameter, length, capacity, format, shade), with a stock and a price per combination, and a search that finds the right one in two keystrokes. The same mechanism serves tiles (30×30, 40×40, 60×60), paint (1 L, 5 L, 20 L) and PVC pipe (Ø 40, 63, 110).

2. The bag, the metre and the kilo

Cement sells by the bag, cable by the metre, paint by the tin, sand by the truckload, and some items by the kilo. Software designed for a clothes shop counts in whole pieces: it will make you sell 2 metres of cable when the customer wants 2.5.

So you need a selling unit per item, and decimal quantities where they make sense. The rule to remember: you sell 1.250 kg of iron, but never 1.5 bags of cement. The unit carries the constraint, not the input field, and good software refuses the fraction where it is absurd.

3. Contractors' outstanding balances

It is subject number one in a building-materials business, and the one till software handles worst. Your customers are not passers-by: they are companies and site managers who take the goods and settle at thirty or sixty days.

What you must be able to do without opening a notebook:

• release the goods without taking payment, with the invoice staying open;
• see at any moment what each customer owes, and for how long;
• take a partial settlement that applies first to the oldest invoice, with no manual arbitration;
• read the business's total outstanding balance at a glance, because that is the figure that decides your cash position.

A customer who has owed you for ninety days cannot be seen in a notebook; they can be seen in a list sorted by age. That list is what triggers the phone call, and that call is what brings the money in.

4. The shop and the depot

The showroom is not the depot, and the Akpakpa depot is not the Godomey one. A single global stock figure will have you promising a customer goods that are fifteen kilometres away.

What you need: a stock per store, transfers between depots confirmed at reception (the receiver confirms what actually arrived, otherwise the transfer is only a statement of intent), and partitioned permissions, so the showroom seller cannot edit the depot's stock.

5. What expires, what carries a serial number

It gets forgotten in building materials: glues, renders, resins and some paints have expiry dates. Software that tracks batches makes you move the batch that expires first, instead of letting the back of the pallet age into a write-off.

Symmetrically, site equipment (generators, concrete mixers, power tools) carries serial numbers. Being able to answer "this number, who did we sell it to and when?" settles a warranty claim in thirty seconds instead of half a day in the binders.

6. The money that sleeps

A hardware store is capital sitting on shelves. The question an owner must be able to answer at any moment is not "how much did I sell" but "how much have I tied up, and in what".

Three figures are enough, and they must be readable without computing anything: the stock value at cost, depot by depot; the dormant stock, what has not moved for three or six months; and the cover, that is, how many days of sales you have on the shelf for each reference. The first tells you what you have tied up, the second where to destock, the third what to order before you run out.

What Kimbea does not do yet

Better to say it before the demo than after: Kimbea does not handle the delivery note yet. The pro forma invoice does exist: you issue it from the till out of the basket, with your IFU and the customer's, the amount in words and your terms; when the customer comes back with the money, it reloads into the till at the prices you committed to, even if your price list changed in between. What is still missing is the document that travels with the goods when they leave before being invoiced. It is on the roadmap, and a customer who requires it will shape its design.

Everything else above exists and can be shown: variants, selling units, outstanding balances by age, multi-depot with re-checked transfers, batches and expiry, search by batch or serial number, stock value and dormant stock. On top of them come the e-MECeF standardised invoice and SYSCOHADA accounting, which start from the same sales with no re-keying.

How do you manage rebar, which has several diameters and lengths?

With variants: you declare two axes, diameter and length, and each combination carries its own stock, price and code. The Kimbea catalogue comes prepared for this trade, with diameters from 6 to 32 mm and lengths from 1 to 6 metres already in place.

Can you sell by the metre or the kilo?

Yes. Each item carries its selling unit and accepts decimal quantities where they make sense (2.5 metres of cable, 1.250 kg of iron), while refusing the fraction where it is absurd, such as half a bag of cement.

How do you track what the contractors owe us?

The goods leave without payment, the invoice stays open, and the customer's outstanding balance is tracked by age. A partial settlement applies first to the oldest invoice, and the business's total outstanding balance sits on the dashboard.

Can the stock be spread across several depots?

Yes: a stock per store, transfers re-checked at reception, and permissions partitioned store by store so a seller cannot touch the stock of a depot that is not theirs.

Does Kimbea do quotes and delivery notes?

The pro forma invoice, yes: it is issued from the till out of the basket, carries your IFU and the customer's, the amount in words and your terms, and later reloads into the till at the prices you committed to. The delivery note, not yet: it is on the roadmap. We prefer to say so before the demo.

We already have software. Do we have to change everything?

No, and that is not what we propose up front. The right question is what your current tool does not do: the e-MECeF standardised invoice, outstanding balances by age, stock by variant, or a till that keeps selling when the network goes down. That is where the comparison means something.