Which items made the most money last month, not the most sales?
A ranked table by gross margin with cost of goods deducted - so the fast-moving item you assumed was your best earner gets compared against the one that quietly out-earns it.
Ask your shop anything. Get an answer from your own numbers.
Rai is Swahili for advice. It is also an AI business analyst that lives inside UpeoRetail - reporting on your shop, telling you what to do about it, and showing you the figures behind every word.
- Grounded in a checked metric catalog, never a guessed query
- Your records never leave your own server
- Reads freely, writes only with your approval
Grounded
KES, cost of goods deducted · 6 of 14 categories
Power tools carried the month at KES 412,000 gross margin - more than plumbing, paint and adhesives combined.
But the margin rate on power tools fell from 22% to 17% after Bidii Hardware raised unit prices in April. Your shelf price has not moved since February.
gross_margin_by_category· 1–30 June · all branchessupplier_price_variance· Bidii Hardware · 12 SKUs
Why it exists
Most shops already have the answer. They just cannot ask the question.
Ask an owner which items sold the most last month and most can tell you. Ask which items made the most money after what the supplier charged, and the room goes quiet - because that answer needs sales data and purchase data joined together, and those live in different places.
So owners run on feel. Feel is reliably right about the top three items and unreliable about everything below them, which is exactly where the slow leaks are.
What you can ask
Real questions, and what comes back.
No query language, no report builder, no waiting for someone to configure a dashboard. These are typed the way you would say them out loud.
Ni nini haijauzwa kwa muda mrefu?
12 items untouched for 90 days, KES 340,000 of capital sitting in them, listed worst first with what each one is holding.
Is anything about to run out?
Days of cover per item from real sales velocity, with the fast movers that will stock out before your next delivery flagged first.
Which supplier is charging me more for the same thing?
Unit price variance across suppliers for every SKU you buy from more than one - with what the gap has cost you over the period.
Where did this unit come from and is it still under warranty?
Serial-level history: the supplier, the purchase invoice, the sale, the warranty window, and whether it has been returned before.
What should I be worried about this week?
Three specific things, each with the figure behind it - not a dashboard to interpret, a short list to act on.
The part that matters most
A confidently wrong number is worse than no number.
Point an AI at a business database and it will happily write a query and hand you a figure. That figure will look exactly like a correct one - which is the problem, because you will price against it.
What a guessing tool misses
Credit notes that reversed part of a sale. Invoices still sitting in draft. The fact that reconciled revenue lives in the ledger rather than the invoice list, and that gross margin is not stored anywhere at all - it has to be rebuilt from cost of goods.
What Rai does instead
It reasons over a catalog of business measures - revenue, margin, turnover, days of cover, dead stock, supplier variance, receivables, till position - each mapped once, by a person, to a query that has been checked. Rai picks the right measure. It does not invent the arithmetic.
And when it has to improvise
For a genuinely unusual question, Rai will say so, work it out on a strictly read-only path, and show you the working. An answer that admits it is less certain is worth more than one that is never unsure and is sometimes wrong.
Everything in version one
Ten things it does from the day it is switched on.
Not a roadmap of intentions. This is the locked scope of the first release, write-safety included rather than promised for later.
Reports you never had to build
Ask in plain language, get a table and a chart. Export to PDF or Excel, or save it as a report you can rerun next month. Nobody configures anything.
Advice with its receipts attached
Reorder decisions, pricing moves, dead stock to clear, suppliers to consolidate - each citing the numbers it rests on, so you can disagree on the evidence.
The owner brief
A short scheduled digest: what moved, what is at risk, three things worth doing. This is the habit that makes the rest of it get used at all.
Alerts that fire on the day
A fast mover about to stock out, a margin sliding on a category, a supplier price jumping, a till that will not reconcile - the moment it happens, not at month end.
On WhatsApp, where you already are
Questions, briefs and alerts in the thread you check anyway, with SMS fallback for wherever coverage is unreliable.
English, Swahili or Sheng
Ask in the language you actually think in and get answered in it. Switch mid-conversation and it follows you.
Leakage and anomaly detection
Unusual voids, odd discounts, after-hours sales, recurring cash shortfalls. The signals of shrinkage that your data already contains and nobody has time to look for.
Warranty and defective-batch intelligence
Units still inside their warranty window, and returns clustering around one supplier batch - the pattern that is invisible one repair at a time.
Demand forecasting
Predicted stock-out dates and suggested reorder quantities from your own sales history, so the advice looks forward rather than only back.
Photo to draft entry
Photograph a supplier invoice or delivery note. Rai reads it and drafts the purchase entry beside what it extracted - for you to approve.
Where it meets you
In the app you already have open.
We built a good in-app chat panel for Rai, and the owner still has to decide to open it. Deciding costs attention, and running a shop already spends that on suppliers, staff and cash.
So Rai works on WhatsApp. The questions get asked in the gaps a working day is made of - waiting for a delivery, between customers, at nine in the evening about something that has been bothering you since lunchtime. The brief arrives there too, before the shop gets busy.
And it answers in whatever language you wrote in. That is not decoration: an owner perfectly comfortable in English will still, given the choice, ask about their own money in Swahili. Removing that small step is the difference between a habit and a chore.
Why the channel decides adoptionRaiWhatsApp Business
Rai · daily brief
Habari ya asubuhi. Jana: KES 218,400 (+9% wiki iliyopita). Hatari: DRL-18V-XR imebaki siku 3. Bei ya Bidii imepanda 4%.
Ni nini haijauzwa kwa muda mrefu?
Rai
Vitu 12 havijauzwa kwa siku 90. Jumla KES 340,000 imelala hapo. Kubwa zaidi: paint sprayers (KES 96,000), taa za solar (KES 61,000).
Niwekee order ya hizo drills
Rai
Nimeandaa draft ya PO - vitu 3, Bidii Hardware. Fungua hapa uidhinishe. Sitahifadhi mpaka ukubali.
Asked in Swahili, answered in Swahili. Ask in English or Sheng and it follows you. The draft still has to be approved in the app - a chat reply is never a signature.
The line we do not cross
Rai drafts. You decide.
An AI that reads your shop and gets something wrong costs you five minutes. An AI that writes to your shop and gets something wrong costs you a reconciliation - and you find out weeks later, when you have to work out which of three hundred entries was the invented one.
So the useful work is automated and the decision is not. By the time you see a draft, the lookup, the arithmetic and the typing are done. What is left takes seconds, and it is the part that should stay with a person.
Owners come to this step expecting to tolerate it. What most of them report is that reading the reasoning behind each draft taught them something about their own shop.
Draft · not savedPO draft · Bidii Hardware
| Item | Qty | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| 18V brushless drillDRL-18V-XR | 12 | 8,400 |
| 40-piece bit setBIT-SET-40 | 25 | 1,150 |
| 5.0Ah battery packBAT-5AH-XR | 10 | 4,900 |
Why these numbers
The drill has been selling at 6 a day and you have 11 days of cover left. Bidii is KES 340 cheaper per unit than Mwangi Traders on this SKU across your last four orders.
Nothing is written to your books until someone with permission taps approve - and the approval is recorded against their name.
Read freely, write only with approval
Rai can prepare a purchase order or a purchase entry. It cannot save either one. Nothing reaches your live data without a person tapping approve.
Scoped to what the person can already do
Rai acts as the person using it, through your existing permissions. If a staff member cannot create a purchase order by hand, they cannot get Rai to create one for them.
Everything is on the record
Every question, the query it ran, the answer it gave, the action it proposed, and who approved it. Your accountant can follow all of it.
Reversible by design
Every write path has a defined way back. If a path cannot be cleanly undone, we do not build it - that rule has already removed features from this list.
Where your data sits
The reasoning is ours. The records stay yours.
Every owner asks where their data goes, and usually gets a reassurance rather than an answer. Here is the actual answer.
Your rows do not leave because the software on your server has no way to send them - not because of a clause in a contract. The same split keeps our own work off machines we do not control, which is why it will still be true in five years. How the split works
Built for a specific shop
Narrow on purpose.
Version one is for electronics, hardware and spare-parts traders in Kenya. These businesses live on inventory accuracy, thin margins and buying the same item from several suppliers. Serial numbers matter. Warranty windows matter. One defective batch can quietly eat a month.
It is the hardest kind of shop to run on instinct, which makes it the one where grounded answers are worth the most. It also means the metric catalog can be finite - and a finite catalog is one we can actually get right.
- Electronics shops carrying serialised stock across several suppliers
- Hardware and building-supply traders with thin margins and wide catalogues
- Spare-parts dealers where the same part comes from three sources at three prices
- Any trader whose capital is mostly sitting on shelves rather than in the bank
Where it goes
Embedded now, standalone later - by design, not by hope.
Inside UpeoRetail, Kenya first
Everything on this page, embedded in the system your shop already runs, with a metric catalog built for electronics, hardware and spare parts.
Across Africa
The same product rolled into more markets, with card payment coverage alongside M-Pesa for top-ups.
Rai standalone
The reasoning lifted into its own service with adapters for spreadsheets and accounting platforms - so a business that does not run UpeoRetail can still point Rai at what it has. The architecture was built for this from the first day.
Questions
The things people ask first.
What is Rai?
Rai is an AI business analyst built into UpeoRetail. You ask any question about your shop in plain language and it answers with a real report drawn from your own data, plus advice that cites the figures behind it. The name is Swahili for advice or counsel.
How do I know the numbers are right?
Rai does not write its own database queries. It reasons over a catalog of business measures that a person defined and checked in advance, so the arithmetic behind revenue, margin or stock turnover is settled before you ever ask. On the rare question no measure covers, it says so and shows you exactly how it worked the answer out.
Does my business data leave my premises?
No. A small connector on your own server runs each query locally against your own database and returns only computed totals. Your invoices, customer records and individual transactions never travel. The reasoning happens on our infrastructure; the data stays on yours.
Can Rai change my records?
Only with your approval. It can draft a purchase order or turn a photographed supplier invoice into a draft purchase entry, but nothing is saved until a person with the right permission approves it. Every approval is logged against a name and every write can be reversed.
Does it work on WhatsApp?
Yes. You can ask questions, receive the scheduled brief, and get alerts on WhatsApp, with SMS fallback where coverage is unreliable. Approvals are the exception - those happen in the app, because a chat reply is a poor signature.
What kind of business is Rai built for?
Version one is built for electronics, hardware and spare-parts shops in Kenya - traders whose margins depend on inventory accuracy and who buy the same items from several suppliers. That focus is deliberate: a narrow catalog is one we can actually get right.
What does it cost?
Rai is an opt-in add-on: a flat monthly fee with a bucket of included requests, then metered usage beyond that. Pricing is being finalised - book a strategy session and we will walk you through it against your actual volumes.
See it answer a question about your own shop.
The fastest way to judge Rai is to point it at a month you have already closed and check what it says against what you know. Book a session and we will do exactly that.