Thirty years of memory
Aline Uwase inherited her mother’s butcher’s shop in Nyabugogo in April 2025. She inherited a 30-year-old brand, a loyal customer base, and twelve WhatsApp groups where orders lived.
Six months later, the shop looks the same from the street. Inside, everything has changed.
The before
Aline’s mother ran the shop on memory. She remembered which customers paid weekly, which paid monthly, which were owed a favor from a wedding in 2019. Suppliers were paid on handshake. Stock was counted by walking the cold room on Sunday.
“It worked for thirty years,” Aline told us, “because my mother remembered everything. I don’t. Nobody can, at our scale now.”
The transition
Aline spent the first two months not changing anything. She watched. She wrote down the unspoken rules — who got credit, how much, for how long. She photographed the Sunday stock count and imported it into a spreadsheet.
In month three, she started invoicing through GwizaSuite. In month four, payments. In month six, the accounting module closed her first real month-end — with a trial balance that tied on the first try.
My mother didn’t want a tool. She wanted to know the numbers were still honest. Once she saw her own handshakes reflected back in the customer statements, she stopped resisting.— Aline Uwase, Uwase Butchery, Nyabugogo
What Aline keeps from the old way
- The Sunday walk-through. “I do the count on paper first, then enter it. The walking is the point.”
- Handshake credit terms. They’re recorded in the tool now, but still agreed face-to-face.
- The WhatsApp groups. Orders still come in that way — she transcribes them into the system within an hour.
The shop’s numbers aren’t different. The trust in those numbers is.