Is your attendant stealing, or is the shop not counting?

Money is short and the first name that comes to mind is the person behind the counter. She may be. So may four other things that look exactly the same — and a shop with no record cannot tell them apart.

Published 5 October 2026

The question you cannot answer

You count the bales on a quiet afternoon and the shop is short. Or the drawer is light at closing, twice in one week. The first thing that arrives is a name, and the name is usually the person who is in the shop when you are not.

But stop and ask what you actually know. You know the shop is short. You do not know when it went short, whether it went in one piece or in small pieces over two months, which fabric it went from, or who was standing behind the counter when it happened. A notebook holds amounts. It does not hold names and it does not hold times, so it cannot answer a single one of those questions.

You are not short of suspicion. You are short of a record.

Four things that look exactly like stealing

The figures below are made-up examples. The situations are not.

1. The unit changed in the middle

You buy lace by the piece, sell it by the yard, and store it in bales. Somewhere between the three, a figure gets written in a unit nobody stated, and in a shop with no unit on the line this is the error that goes unnoticed longest.

Say a piece runs six yards and lace is ₦15,800 a yard. You count eight pieces on the shelf and write “8” on a line the ledger reads as yards. The ledger expects 48 yards, your count says 8, and the shop appears to be 40 yards short — ₦632,000 of nothing at all. Nobody took anything. The count and the ledger were speaking two different languages on the same day.

2. The discount nobody wrote down

Your price on ankara is ₦5,000 a yard. A customer bargains hard on a slow Tuesday, your attendant cannot reach you, and she lets six yards go at ₦27,000 instead of ₦30,000 rather than lose the sale. That is a defensible decision and it may well be the one you would have made. But if the only thing recorded is “ankara sold”, the shop's money and the shop's record are now ₦3,000 apart with no explanation attached. Eleven of those in a month is ₦33,000 that looks precisely like a hand in the drawer.

3. Goods that went out on trust

Your cousin collects six yards and will pay at the weekend. A regular customer takes a piece and settles at month end. You yourself take two yards home for a function. Every one of those is normal trade, and every one of them is a hole in the count unless somebody writes a line. Nothing was stolen. Nothing was recorded either, which at the end of the month is the same arithmetic.

4. The arithmetic

A column of figures added by hand, at seven in the evening, by somebody who has been standing since morning. It is worth saying plainly: some of your shortfall is addition. It is the least interesting cause on this list and it is the first one to rule out.

What separates them is a name and a time

Look at the four again. Wrong unit, unrecorded discount, goods out on trust, bad addition — all four produce the same symptom, which is a gap between what you expect and what you count. None of them can be told apart from theft, or from each other, after the fact.

But all four become visible the moment every movement carries three things: what moved, who moved it, and when. Not because a name catches a thief. Because a name and a time let you line a gap up against a day, a shift and a transaction, and most gaps then explain themselves.

How to find out, in seven days, without buying anything

You can do this with the notebook you already have. Do not try to audit the whole shop; it will collapse by Wednesday.

1. Pick one fabric. The one you suspect, or your fastest mover. One.
2. Count it today and write the unit down in words. “34 yards”, not “34”. Half the errors in this exercise come from the unit going unsaid.
3. For seven days, every sale of that one fabric gets four things: quantity, amount, who sold it, and what time. Four short lines, one each.
4. Every yard that leaves and is not a sale gets a line too. Credit, a gift, a sample, your own household, cloth spoiled or returned. This step is the one people skip, and skipping it is what makes the whole count worthless.
5. Count again on day seven, same unit, same time of day, ideally with the same person watching.
6. Do the arithmetic. Opening count, minus everything sold, minus everything else that left, equals what should be there. Compare that with what you counted.

Then read the result honestly.

• No gap. Your shop was not being robbed; it was not being counted. That is the best outcome on this list, and the cheapest to fix.
• A gap with no pattern. Usually units or arithmetic. Repeat the week with the unit written on every single line.
• A gap that sits on particular days, particular hours, or one person's shifts. Now you have something worth taking seriously. You still do not have proof, and what you do next matters more than what you have found.

Before you accuse anybody

General information for traders, not legal advice. Take advice on your own position before you act on it.

Do not raise it in front of customers or your other attendants. Do not search anyone, hold anyone, or take their phone: searching or detaining a person can put you on the wrong side of the law whatever they have done, and it will cost you far more than the stock. Get the record into one place first, written down, with dates, so that the conversation is about a document and not about your feeling. Then speak to a lawyer about dismissal, deduction or a police report before you take any of those steps, because the consequences of doing them wrongly land on you.

And consider the quieter possibility. If the record has been thin for a year, the honest reading is often that the shop made it easy and somebody drifted. That is still a loss and it still has to stop. It is a different conversation from one about a thief, and it is far more likely to end with you keeping somebody worth keeping.

What it costs to be wrong

An attendant you accuse and lose is not a neutral outcome. You lose the months it took her to learn your stock, your customers' faces, your prices and which bale is where. In a market, you also lose some of your name, because she will talk and so will her family.

This is the part most advice on this subject gets backwards. The shops that keep good people are not the shops that watch hardest. They are the shops where the record is so ordinary and so complete that nobody has to be watched, and where an honest attendant can prove she was honest without asking anyone to take her word for it.

Questions traders ask

General information for traders, not legal advice.

Should I put a camera in the shop?

A camera is good at the door and poor at the ledger. It can show you a hand in a drawer. It cannot tell you what price was agreed, what was written down afterwards, or whether the two match — and that gap between the price and the record is where a shop's money usually goes. A camera answers questions about things. Your problem is almost always a question about figures.

Should I tell her I am counting?

Yes. A count you hide is a trap, and the shop will feel like one long before you find anything. A count you announce is a system, and a system can apply to everybody without insulting anybody. There is also a practical reason: announcing it very often ends the problem by itself, which is a cheaper outcome than catching somebody.

She has worked for me for six years. Surely not her?

Long service cuts both ways and it is worth being honest about it. The person who has been there longest usually has the most access and the least supervision, so if anyone is taking, they can take the most. That same person is also the one you can least afford to lose and most likely to be innocent. Neither instinct is evidence. The count is.

How do I count a bale that is already part sold?

Measure what is left rather than working back from what you think went, and write the measurement and its unit on the line the day you take it. A part-sold bale is the softest place in any count, because everybody in the shop has a slightly different idea of how much was on it to begin with. One measured figure, written down, ends that argument permanently.

Can I take the money out of her salary?

Treat that as a legal question rather than a shop one. What an employer may take out of wages in Nigeria is governed by statute rather than by the employer's own decision, and the rules turn on details of the particular employment, so it is not a judgement to make from a web page. Before you deduct, dismiss or report anyone, talk to a lawyer about your own position — and have your records in order first, because that is what the conversation will turn on.