Digital khata with inventory: why credit and stock belong together

Can a digital khata track inventory too?

A khata app on its own can't. It records a rupee amount against a customer's name and never sees the items, so there's nothing to subtract from a shelf. To track both, the credit sale has to be a real sale with line items: the goods are recorded, the stock is deducted and the amount is added to the customer's balance in one step. That's a POS with a built-in credit ledger. NexusTill does this on every plan, including Starter at Rs 2,999 a month, with inventory and low-stock alerts.

What goes wrong when credit and stock are kept apart?

Say a third of your sales are on udhaar, which is common for a kiryana. If those sales are only amounts in a khata app, your inventory system never hears about them. It still counts stock you sold three weeks ago. That one gap causes several problems, and they add up:

• Your stock count reads high. The system says twelve bags of atta and you have four. The low-stock alert never goes off because on paper you're fine.
• You reorder from that wrong number. You miss what you've actually run out of, and you order things already sitting in the back.
• Your day's sales total only shows cash, so a normal day with a lot of credit looks like a bad one.
• You can't know the profit on that third of the business, because no cost price was ever attached to those sales.

Fixing it is manual. Someone has to walk the shelves, count, and correct the numbers. That job gets skipped in a busy week, and then skipped again.

A credit sale is a stock movement that hasn't been paid for yet

When Ahmed takes six bags of atta on udhaar, the atta leaves your shop exactly as it would if he'd paid cash. The only difference is where the money is: in his pocket instead of your drawer. When he pays has nothing to do with whether the goods moved.

Good software treats the sale and the payment as two separate events. The sale moves the stock and creates the balance. The payment, whenever it comes, clears the balance and changes nothing else. That way one entry keeps both your shelves and your receivables right.

What do you get when credit and stock share one entry?

The sale takes no longer. You still add the items, mark it udhaar and hand over the goods. Afterwards you can answer questions you couldn't before:

• Low-stock alerts that count what left on credit, so they go off when you are actually running low.
• An itemised, dated balance for each customer, so a disputed total can be checked line by line.
• A real daily total of cash plus credit, which tells you whether it was a good day.
• Profit on credit sales, because each line carries its cost price as well as its selling price.
• A reorder list based on what's really on the shelf, so the shelf is full on the day the customer wants it.

Why it matters more for a medical store

For a kiryana, the split wastes money. For a medical store it's worse, because medicine expires: a batch you think you still have is a batch you aren't selling before its date. NexusTill tracks pharmacy batches and expiry on the Growth plan. General inventory and low-stock alerts are on every plan, including Starter.

How do you start without counting the whole shop?

You don't need a perfect opening count of every item. Start with the items that matter and add the rest as you buy:

1. 1Enter your fast movers first, the thirty or so items that make up most of your sales. Count those properly, because that's where wrong numbers cost you.
2. 2Add your regular udhaar customers with today's outstanding balance as an opening amount.
3. 3From tomorrow, bill every sale, cash and credit alike, through the same till. This is the only habit that has to change.
4. 4Add the slower items when they arrive on your next purchase, instead of counting the whole shop in one evening.
5. 5After two weeks, count three fast movers and compare them with the system. If they match, it's working.

Do you actually need this?

If you carry almost no stock, or you can see all of it from where you stand, an inventory system solves a problem you don't have, and a free khata app fits better than a monthly fee. Joining credit and stock pays off when you carry too many items to keep in your head and give enough credit that the gap between the shelf and the count is real money.

NexusTill keeps the khata and the stock in the same entry. A credit sale deducts the goods, adds a dated balance to the customer and shows up in your day's real total. It bills offline, so a dead signal doesn't break anything. The 7-day trial needs no card to start and doesn't turn into a paid plan on its own. At the end of it, count a few shelves and see whether the numbers agree.

The goods left the shop. Whether the money came with them is a separate question, and software that can't tell the two apart gets both wrong.

Written by The NexusTill team.