TopClean+
A cash flow and operations tool for small service businesses, where the everyday reality of handling money in person rarely lines up with what eventually makes it to the books. First deployed at a cleaning and laundry operation in Benin, the approach generalizes to any business that depends on a single person to both take payment and record it.
The problem
Two years of quiet cash leakage
Consider a cleaning and laundry business in Benin with twenty-one employees and monthly revenue in the neighborhood of ten million CFA francs on a good month. At the front desk, a single receptionist takes payment from customers and, in the same motion, records that payment in the ledger. There is no second pair of eyes. There is no photograph. There is no end-of-day reconciliation.
Over the course of two years, the owner began to notice a widening gap between what the business was earning on paper and what appeared in his accounts. He could feel that cash was leaving the system. He could not prove where, when, or by whom. Firing the receptionist would not necessarily solve the underlying vulnerability. The problem was not the person running the front desk. The problem was the design of the front desk itself.
What it does
Separates who touches cash from who records it, by design
Transaction entry
Each transaction is recorded with the client's name, the service rendered, the amount owed, the payment method, and an optional photograph. The paper trail is created at the moment of sale, rather than reconstructed afterward from memory.
Expense tracking
Every expense logged in the system requires a photograph of the receipt. Phantom expenses, which used to account for a meaningful share of unexplained outflows, simply cannot be entered.
Daily closing
At the end of each working day, the system walks the staff through a count of the physical cash on hand and a reconciliation of mobile money received. Any gap between the reported total and the counted total is flagged immediately, rather than discovered weeks later.
Owner dashboard
The owner sees the business on a single screen: live revenue, a breakdown by payment method, pending approvals, and progress against each service line. Decisions that used to require a Sunday afternoon with a spreadsheet can now be made at a glance.
French chat assistant
Staff members can create tickets or log expenses by typing in plain French, as if they were texting. This matters because training time is a hidden cost of any new system, and typing is a skill most employees already have.
Weekly Excel export
Every week, the app can export a four-sheet spreadsheet summarizing tickets, expenses, the weekly balance, and each day's closing. The format travels naturally to an accountant, a bank, or a tax authority.
Why it works
A design decision, not just a feature list
TopClean+ is built around a practical observation: most cash leaks in small service businesses are possible because no one looks at the same transaction twice. The app's job is to introduce that second look. Every action that touches money generates a photograph, a timestamp, or a reconciliation step that sits outside the hands of the person who took the cash. The receptionist still runs the front desk. What changes is that the written record of the day no longer depends on their memory alone.
The technical side of the product is deliberately modest. Data lives in the browser's local storage, wrapped in a progressive web app that installs on any phone and keeps working when the internet does not. There are two user roles, owner and staff, each protected by a four-digit PIN. Much of the design assumes a region where bandwidth, electricity, and connectivity are not always dependable, so the app tries to stay useful when one of them drops.