Software for shops that outgrew paper

Why the company exists

OsemFlow started with a set of observations that anyone who has spent time around small businesses will recognise.

A shop owner keeps sales in an exercise book. Stock lives in their head, mostly accurately, until a proper count gets done on a quiet evening and the number turns out to be different from the one they had been trading on. What customers owe is remembered rather than recorded, and it works until the customer remembers something else.

None of that is carelessness. It is what happens when the tools available are either a notebook, which is free and always to hand, or software built for a different kind of business at a price that assumes you are one.

The gap in between is where this company decided to work.

What we kept finding is that the problem is rarely the till on its own. Plenty of shops have something that takes payments. The trouble starts because the thing that takes payments knows nothing about the stock room, so somebody has to make the two agree afterwards, usually at the end of a long day and usually by hand. The reconciliation is the work. The till was never the hard part.

So OsemFlow was built as one system rather than two joined together. A sale moves stock as it happens. An invoice raised on credit shows up in the customer's balance immediately. There is nothing to reconcile later because there was never a second set of numbers.