Coffee processing software that costs the lot, not the kilo you bought

You buy one weight and sell another

Coffee is one of the few trades where what you buy and what you sell are not the same commodity in the same unit. Kiboko comes into the store heavy and wet and is paid for by the kilo. Clean coffee leaves for Kampala dry and hulled and is paid for by the kilo. Between the two, a third to a half of the weight is gone — as water, as husk, as screenings.

So the price you pay at the scale cannot be set against the price you are offered for FAQ. It has to be divided by the outturn first. Kiboko at 5,000 with a 52 percent outturn is not coffee at 5,000; it is coffee at 9,615 before you have hulled, bagged or moved a kilo. The exporter knows this exactly. The agent buying for you at a roadside store, working off what he paid last week, often does not.

PesaScope will not measure your moisture or grade your beans. It holds the weight and the money on both sides — what came into the store, what came out of the mill, what the lot fetched — so a lot's outturn is a figure on record rather than a percentage you have carried in your head since last season.

How a lot is recorded

1. Buy at the store, by weightA purchase against the farmer or the agent, in kilos. If you buy by the bag, set the conversion once so a 60 kg bag counts as sixty kilos and the cost per kilo is right.
2. Pay at the scale or carry the balancePay in full and nothing is owing. Part-pay and the remainder is raised against that supplier, so what the store owes across a buying week is one list rather than four notebooks.
3. Record everything that touches the lot after it arrivesHulling per kilo, transport to Kampala, jute bags, sorting labour, store rent. They arrive after the coffee does, which is exactly why they are the costs most often left out.
4. Record the sale with the clean weightThe buyer's weighbridge figure is the one that counts. With it and the kiboko weight, the lot's outturn becomes arithmetic instead of assumption.

What a processor buys and sells

Pick "Coffee processing" at sign-up and this list is already there, and the whole point of it is that kiboko and clean coffee are never allowed to be one line.

Husks and screenings sell. A store that never records them is handing away real income and calling it waste. Hulling other people's coffee sits as a service, so the fee is never confused with a coffee sale.

One lot of 10,000 kg of kiboko

Outturn is the whole business. At 50 percent instead of 52 — the same ten tonnes of kiboko giving 5,000 kg of clean rather than 5,200 — the lot sells for UGX 53,000,000 and loses UGX 60,000. Two points of outturn are worth more than hulling, transport, bags, rent and labour together.

What the app will not do for an exporter

There are no moisture readings, no screen or grade analysis, no cupping scores and no defect counts. Grading stays with your quality man and his sieve. PesaScope holds weights, costs and money, and knows nothing about the bean.

There is no export documentation either. No UCDA paperwork, no phytosanitary certificates, no ICO marks, no shipment tracking, and no record of forward sales or contracts. Sell against a contract three months out and the app records the money on the day it lands, not the position you carry until then. Certification chains — organic, Fairtrade, traceability back to a garden — are outside it too.

And nothing warns you that coffee is drying down in the store. Coffee taken in at eighteen percent moisture and shipped at thirteen weighs noticeably less than the figure you entered. The app knows the weight you told it, not the weight on the floor this morning. Weigh the store before you quote anybody a tonnage.

Where a coffee shilling leaks

1. Buying on last season's outturnA store price set from a percentage nobody has checked since the last crop. Recording input and clean weight on every lot replaces memory with a number.
2. The costs that arrive after the coffeeHulling, transport, bags, loading, store rent. On the lot above they came to UGX 3,060,000 — half as much again as everything the lot kept.
3. Weight standing in the storeCoffee held back for a better price is money not working, and it loses weight while it waits. Only one of those ever gets discussed.
4. One buyer, one price, every timeSelling every lot to the same exporter out of habit. Recorded sale by sale, the differences between buyers become a column rather than an impression.

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