Free Small-Shop Bookkeeping Tracker: Practical Tips and Common Mistakes

What the tracker actually calculates

Net profit is total sales minus total expenses for the period you have filtered, while cash on hand is only the cash part of that same ledger. The Free Small-Shop Bookkeeping Tracker shows both as summary tiles and recalculates them on every add or delete, which is why the two tiles can disagree on a good day.

Say you ring up 12,000 DZD in sales, of which 8,000 DZD is paid in cash and 4,000 DZD is on credit, and you pay 3,500 DZD for stock out of the till. The tiles read 12,000 DZD sales, 3,500 DZD expenses, 8,500 DZD net profit and 4,500 DZD cash on hand — profit counts the credit sale, the cash tile does not.

The four filter chips (Today, This week, This month, All) drive all four tiles and the ledger beneath them. Amounts are in DZD, must be greater than zero, are capped at 9,999,999 and round to two decimals, so a fat-fingered 450000 is accepted but a negative correction is not — you delete and re-enter instead.

Log a sale in 15 seconds

The entry form sits above the ledger on purpose, and its defaults already match a counter sale: Sale selected, date set to today, category General, payment Cash. For a plain cash sale that means typing the amount and confirming — the two-tap path the page was built around, and the reason it works with one thumb while a customer waits.

The optional note field is 60 characters and trims whitespace, which is enough for "2 kg semoule" or "Ahmed owes, due Fri" but not for a full invoice. Use it for anything you would otherwise have to remember at closing time; the note appears in the ledger row next to the category.

Resist the urge to batch the day's sales at 22:00 from memory. Recording each sale as it happens keeps the cash tile honest during the day and takes far less time than reconstructing a day of small transactions from a scrap of paper.

Why doesn't cash on hand match profit?

A credit sale counts toward total sales and net profit but never toward cash on hand, because the money has not reached the till yet. A single 5,000 DZD credit sale with no expenses gives 5,000 DZD sales, 5,000 DZD profit and 0 DZD cash on hand, which looks like a bug to anyone seeing it first time.

The tracker has no "mark as paid" step, so pick one convention and stick to it. Either log the credit sale when the goods leave (profit matches the calendar, the cash gap is your receivables) or leave it out and log a cash sale when the customer actually pays (cash matches the till, profit lands on the payment day). Mixing the two conventions is the single most common reason a shop's numbers stop making sense.

Expenses are simpler and blunter: they have no cash-or-credit toggle, so every expense you enter reduces cash on hand. If you buy stock on 30-day supplier credit, record the expense on the day you actually hand over the money, not the day the delivery arrives.

Common mistakes in a small-shop cash book

Filing a stock purchase under Other instead of Stock is easy to fix on the day and painful after six months. The expense list is Stock, Rent, Utilities, Transport, Salary and Other — six buckets are enough to see where the money goes, but only if the obvious purchase lands in the obvious bucket.

There is no edit button on a row, only delete. Deleting the wrong row and re-adding the correct one takes seconds, but deleting a row because the number looked odd — and never re-adding it — quietly shrinks your records. Deleting a sale also lowers profit, so check the tiles after any deletion.

Dates cannot be later than today or earlier than two years ago, which blocks typo years like 2206 but also blocks genuine backfill of an older ledger. If you are migrating a paper book, start from the most recent month and treat anything older as opening context rather than tracker data.

How do you check the books at month end?

Set the filter to This month, count the physical cash in the drawer and compare it with the cash on hand tile. A gap usually has one of three causes: an unrecorded cash expense, a credit sale that was later paid but never logged as cash, or change taken out of the till for personal use and never entered.

The Print button produces a clean sheet with a shop name header line, which is useful for a paper month file or for handing to a bookkeeper. The Download CSV button exports exactly the rows currently filtered, so switch to All before exporting if you want the whole history rather than just the current view.

Treat this as a day-to-day cash control tool, not a tax system — it has no VAT fields, no invoice numbers and no audit trail. Cash books as a concept are well described in Wikipedia's cash book entry, and the wider discipline of bookkeeping is worth a skim if you plan to hand records to an accountant. Verify any figure you file officially with a qualified professional.

Back up before you clear your browser

As of 2026, entries are stored in your own browser's local storage rather than on an account, which is why there is no sign-up and nothing to log into. The trade-off is that clearing site data, resetting the phone or browsing in a private window can wipe the ledger with no recovery path.

Export the CSV at the end of each week, switch the filter to All first so the file is complete, and name it with the date. Keep the files somewhere you already trust — a synced folder or a messaging thread to yourself — and print a monthly sheet if paper is your backup of habit.

The tracker is one of the free online tools on OnlineFree.app that runs entirely in the page. That privacy has a cost: nobody else holds a copy of your numbers, so the backup is your job, not the tool's.

For owners who want the full walkthrough of the sale and expense form before starting, the Free Small-Shop Bookkeeping Tracker opens directly in the browser with today's date already filled in.

References

• Wikipedia — Cash book
• Wikipedia — Bookkeeping