22 August 2026
Selling in Measures: Turning a Bag Into Olonka, Cups and Rubbers Without Losing the Cost
Walk into most provision shops or market stalls in Ghana and you won't find rice sold by the bag. You'll find it sold by the olonka, the cup, the rubber — a bag broken down into the small, everyday measures customers actually buy. Gari, beans, sugar, groundnuts: the same pattern, over and over. The problem isn't the selling. Shop owners have done this forever without any app's help. The problem is the recording — because the moment a bag becomes fifty cups, most bookkeeping methods, including a plain notebook, quietly lose track of what actually happened.
Why This Isn't a Normal Sale
A normal sale is simple: one item leaves, one payment comes in. Selling in measures is different — one item (a bag of rice) leaves stock, and a different item (cups of rice) is what actually gets sold, several times over, across several days. If you just mark the bag as "removed" or "finished" without accounting for what it became, you've lost the bag from your records without ever recording the cups it turned into. Your stock count goes wrong, and so does your cost of goods — because now there's no cost on record for every cup you sell afterward.
The Everyday Examples
This shows up everywhere in a Ghanaian shop. A 50kg bag of rice becomes cups or an olonka at a time. A bag of gari becomes olonka, or small rubbers for customers who just want enough for one meal. Sugar goes from a bag into a cup, or a used milo tin. Groundnuts and beans follow the same pattern — bought in bulk, sold in small local measures that vary from shop to shop and town to town. In every case, the shop paid one price for the whole bag, but earns money back one small measure at a time — and each of those small sales needs its own correct cost, not a guess.
Why You Can't Just Call It a Loss (or an Expense)
The bag didn't spoil, get stolen, or get used personally — none of the usual reasons stock leaves without a sale apply here. The goods are still yours; they've just changed shape. Recording it as a loss would make your books say you lost money you didn't actually lose. Recording it as a new purchase would make it look like you spent money twice on the same rice. What actually happened is a conversion: one item's stock and cost moving into a different item, ready to be sold the way your customers actually buy it.
How to Do It in Yourcountant, Step by Step
1. Go to Stock and open the bulk item — for example, "Rice 50kg bag." 2. Tap Reduce, and enter how many bags you're converting (usually 1). 3. Under "Why are you reducing this stock?", choose Measured Item — it's the one option that doesn't record a loss, because nothing was lost. 4. Choose which item sells it in measures. The first time, tap "+ Create one" and name it something like "Rice — Olonka" or "Rice — Cup," and set what you'll sell each measure for. After that first time, it's already in the list — just pick it. 5. Answer "One bag becomes how many?" — say, 50 cups per bag. Yourcountant works out exactly what each cup cost you, carried across from the bag's real cost, down to the pesewa — not a guess, not a round number. 6. Confirm. The bag leaves your stock count, the 50 cups appear as their own sellable item with the correct cost already attached, and nothing gets recorded as a loss — because your reports would be wrong if it had been.
Do It Once, Then It's a Single Tap
The setup — which item a bag converts to, and how many measures per bag — is only asked the first time. Yourcountant remembers it on the item itself, so the second bag, and every bag after it, is a couple of taps, not a form to fill out again. From there, the cups (or olonka, or rubbers) sell exactly like any other stock item — quantity goes down as you sell, and every sale carries the right cost, so your real profit on rice stays accurate whether you sold it by the bag or one cup at a time.
Keep records like this for your own shop
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