Most shop software asks you to sit through a setup that feels like filing taxes — import spreadsheets, configure categories, tick boxes for features you don't understand yet — before you've sold a single thing. Then it wonders why you never came back.

Stoka is built the other way round. You should be recording a real sale within a few minutes, with almost nothing entered, and let the shop fill itself in as you actually use it. Here is the whole path, start to first close, in one evening.

What you need before you start

Nothing you don't already have. Your phone, the stock on your shelves, and about half an hour. No card, no download, no accountant. If you want to feel it before you commit anything at all, open the live demo — type a shop name and it shows you a working shop with your name on it, no signup.

Setting up your shop, step by step

Step 1 — Name your shop and get your link

Register with your shop name, your name, and an email. That's it. Stoka creates your own shop at yourname.stoka.co.ke and sends you a password. This link is your shop — it's where you'll log in, where you'll sell, and where the dashboard lives. Bookmark it on your phone's home screen so it opens like an app.

Step 2 — Log in and land on your dashboard

Open your link, log in with the password, and you're in. The dashboard will look quiet — because you haven't sold anything yet. That's correct. Don't try to fill everything in now. The only thing worth doing first is putting some stock in.

Step 3 — Add your stock — snap it, or type it

You have two ways in. If you already have a stock list — a photo of a handwritten one, a delivery note, a shelf — use Snap your stock: take the picture, and Stoka reads it and turns it into products you can check and correct before it saves. If you'd rather start small, just add a few products by hand — name, price, how many you have. You do not need to enter your entire shop before you sell. Add your fast movers, start selling, and add the rest as it moves. A half-entered shop that's recording sales beats a perfectly catalogued one you never finished.

Step 4 — Open your first shift

Before you sell, open a shift and record your opening float — the change you're starting with in the drawer. This one small habit is what makes the end of the day mean something: the float is the baseline everything is measured against. Skip it and your closing count has nothing to check itself against. (If this idea is new, the cash-balancing guide explains why the float matters more than it looks.)

Step 5 — Make your first sale, on the right rail

Ring up a real sale. Pick the item, and record how it was paid — cash or M-Pesa — separately, because those are two different rails that fail in two different ways. This is the whole point of recording sales at all: not to make a receipt, but so that at close you can check the drawer against cash sales and the phone against M-Pesa sales, each on its own. Every sale you ring up is also quietly teaching the shop what actually moves — which is what later surfaces your dead stock and tells you what to reorder.

Step 6 — Close the shift and read what it tells you

At the end of the shift, close it. Stoka shows you what the drawer should hold and what M-Pesa should total, and you count against both. If they match, you close in peace. If they don't, you know tonight — with the shift and the day still fresh — instead of discovering a fuzzy gap at month-end with no trail. Then the dashboard, which was empty this morning, finally has something true to show you.

That's the loop. Everything else in Stoka — credit customers, suppliers, restocks, the deeper dashboard — is just more of the same idea, and you'll grow into it. You don't set it up. You use it, and it fills in.

Why so little setup

Because the shops that never adopt software are the ones asked to do a week of data entry before they get anything back. Stoka's bet is the opposite: give you a working sale in five minutes, and let the value show up on day one — a day that actually balances — so you have a reason to come back on day two. The full picture of your shop isn't something you build up front. It's something that accumulates every time you ring up a sale.

If you get stuck at any step, message us on WhatsApp — a real person walks you through it. And if you're still deciding whether any of this is worth it, the honest place to start is the full guide to running a shop that doesn't leak — Stoka is just the tool that makes the discipline in it easy to keep.

Questions owners actually ask

How long does it take to set up?
A few minutes to be recording your first real sale, and about half an hour to be comfortably running a shift. There is no import, no configuration, and nothing to install — you register, add a few products, and start.
Do I need to add all my stock before I can start selling?
No. Add your fast movers first, start selling, and add the rest as it moves. A half-entered shop that is recording sales is far more useful than a perfectly catalogued one you never finished. The shop fills itself in as you use it.
What is "Snap your stock" and how does it work?
Instead of typing every item, you photograph a stock list, a delivery note, or a shelf, and Stoka reads it and turns it into products. You review and correct what it read before it saves, so nothing goes in wrong. It is the fast way to get an existing shop into the system.
Do I need a card or to pay anything to start?
No card and no download. You can open the live demo with no signup at all, or register a real shop for free and start selling. Setup costs you nothing but your shop name and half an hour.
Will I be able to see which sales happened on which shift?
Yes — sales are recorded against the shift they happened in, so each shift closes as its own reconciliation with its own cash and M-Pesa totals. If you have staff who need their own logins, message us on WhatsApp and we will set them up for you.
Does it work on my phone?
Yes. Stoka runs in your phone browser — add your shop link to your home screen and it opens like an app. Most owners run the whole thing, selling and closing shifts, from their phone.