Opening a second shop: tills, locations and figures

What a retailer sets up in Achekam for a second shop, from stock location and tills to the day close, and which per-branch figures to trust today.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Retail businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

The second shop is the moment a retail business stops being run from the owner's head. In one shop, the owner sees the till, the shelves and the staff every day. With two, someone else is in charge of one of them, and the owner needs the systems to say what is happening there: what was sold, what is in stock, whether the cash balanced.

Getting the set-up right before opening day saves months of confusion afterwards. This article covers what to create for a second shop in Achekam, how to stock it, how each branch closes its day, and, honestly, which branch figures on the commerce screens to ignore for now and where the real ones come from.

A stock location for the new shop

Stock in Achekam is held at locations. With the Warehousing add-on, a business keeps stock locations such as warehouses, stores, bins and vans on the server, with the quantity on hand at each.

Create a location for the new shop before anything else. Name it clearly after the shop, the way staff refer to it, such as "Mall shop" or "Main Road shop". If the new shop has a back storeroom you want to count separately, create that as its own location too.

Without the Warehousing add-on, you cannot keep separate locations, so a second shop is usually the point at which it becomes necessary. The add-ons and what each opens are set out in which commerce add-ons a shop actually needs.

Naming its tills, and receipt numbers that never clash

Several tills can run at once, each opened at one of the business's stock locations. A cashier opens a till by naming it and entering the float they counted, and reloading the page finds the open till again. Only one session can be open per till name.

So till names matter more than they seem:

• Make them unique across the business. If both shops have a till called "Till 1", a cashier in one shop could find the other shop's session already open under that name. Use names that include the shop: "Mall A", "Mall B", "Main Road A".
• Open each till at its own shop's location. Stock is taken off the location the till was opened at, so a till opened at the wrong location sells the other shop's stock.

Receipt numbers are not something to plan. The server hands out receipt numbers, so two tills never share one, whichever shop they are in. Pop-up tills at events raise the same questions in a more temporary form; see pop-up tills and floats.

Moving opening stock in from the warehouse

Most second shops are stocked from the first shop or a central warehouse. Use stock transfers. With the Warehousing add-on, a transfer goes from draft to dispatched to received, and a short delivery is recorded as wastage.

For opening stock:

1. Prepare the transfer in draft from the warehouse to the new shop's location, item by item.
2. Dispatch it when the goods leave, with a printed list in the vehicle.
3. Receive it at the new shop, counting each carton against the list.
4. Record any shortage on receipt, so it shows as wastage rather than vanishing.

After the first transfer, the new shop's location holds its opening quantities, and its tills can sell.

Closing each branch's business day

At the end of each day, a branch's business day is closed by a supervisor or manager who was not a cashier that day. Closing freezes the day's Z reports, payments, VAT by rate and differences.

The staffing consequence is easy to miss. Each shop needs, every trading day, a supervisor or manager who did not work a till. In a small second shop with two people, that may mean the owner, or the manager from the first shop, closing the day once the cashiers have cashed up, or arranging shifts so the person who closes did not sell.

The reason for that rule is basic internal control. ACCA's overview of internal controls explains the control environment, the types of control and segregation of duties, and a branch the owner cannot see every day is where those controls earn their keep.

The branch picker and headline figures to ignore for now

Two things on the commerce screens look like branch reporting and are not:

The branch picker lists three invented South African branches instead of your own locations, and the chosen name is sent with each sale. It does not reflect your shops. Do not rely on it to separate one branch's sales from another's.

The sales figures across the top of the commerce screens count only sales rung up in that browser since the page opened, and are always shown in rand. For a Nigerian or Kenyan shop the currency is wrong, and for any shop the figures cover one browser session, not the branch or the day.

Tell your branch managers about both on day one, so nobody reports those numbers to you.

Where per-branch numbers really come from

The figures you can rely on are built from the server's records:

A live X report shows an open till during the day. For the business as a whole, your ledger and management accounts remain the source of truth. If the second shop will trade as a separate legal entity rather than a branch, that changes the set-up again; see running several agency entities.

Before the new shop opens, write its location name, its till names and the name of the person who will close its day each evening on one page, and agree it with the branch manager.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.