What does it mean for a POS to properly support udhaar?
It means you can finish a sale as credit in the same flow as cash: pick the customer, mark it credit, done. The software then keeps a running balance for each customer that updates on every sale and every payment, and dates every entry automatically. If finishing a credit sale means leaving the till screen, opening another section or typing the customer's name and amount a second time, credit sits beside the sale instead of inside it, and your cashier will stop bothering within two weeks.
Why does "supports credit" mean so little on a feature list?
POS software made for markets where credit is rare treats it as an accounts receivable feature, something the office deals with later. That works when three customers a year buy on account. In a Pakistani kiryana, half the counter runs on udhaar, so credit has to be as fast as cash or it becomes the slow option everyone avoids.
What happens next is predictable. The cashier takes the credit sale, means to record it properly later, and gets busy. By evening it's in a notebook. Within a month you have two ledgers again and trust neither, which is the situation the POS was bought to end.
What five things should you check before you buy?
Test these on the actual till screen, not in a sales presentation. Each one is a yes or a no.
- 1Can you finish a sale as udhaar in the same flow as cash, without leaving the till screen? Count the taps. If credit takes twice as many as cash, staff will stop using it.
- 2Does each customer have a running balance that updates from the sale itself, with no separate entry and no retyping of the amount?
- 3Is every entry dated automatically, so an old debt clearly looks old and "kuch mahine pehle" stops being an argument?
- 4Can a credit sale be partly paid? Half now and half on the book is normal, and staff will work around software that forces all or nothing.
- 5Does a credit sale still work with the internet off? Customers buying on credit don't wait for a signal, and a sale that fails offline ends up on paper.
The month-two test
Every POS demos udhaar well. What matters is whether your cashier still uses it in month two, or whether a notebook has appeared next to the till. When credit is slower than cash, the queue pushes the cashier back to paper, whether anyone decided that or not.
A credit sale is a full sale
In software that gets this right, the items are recorded, the stock comes off the shelf, the day's sales total goes up and you can work out the profit on those lines. The only thing that didn't happen is cash entering the drawer.
Software that treats udhaar as "a sale that hasn't happened yet" gets all of that wrong. Your stock stays high because the goods were never deducted. Your day looks bad because the total only counts cash. When the customer finally pays, the payment is recorded as a new sale, which counts the revenue twice and leaves the balance wrong in the other direction.
The right model has two separate events: the sale, which moves the goods and creates the balance, and the payment, which clears the balance and moves nothing else.
What should the POS tell you afterwards?
Recording credit is half the job. The other half is what the software can then tell you, and that is the reason to keep credit in the POS instead of a separate khata app:
- Who owes the most and who has owed the longest. Those are the people worth reminding this week.
- The sales behind one customer's balance, itemised and dated, so you settle a disputed total with a record instead of memory.
- Reminders without an awkward phone call. NexusTill's credit ledger includes email reminders on every plan.
- The day's real total, cash plus credit, so you don't judge the day by the drawer.
- Whether your credit book is growing: udhaar given against udhaar recovered over a few weeks.
Who should be allowed to give credit?
Think about this before you have staff. If more than one person works the counter, everyone needs to see the same balance, and you want to know who recorded what. Starter at Rs 2,999 covers one till and two users, each with their own login, so a second person on the counter is already covered. Growth at Rs 6,999 goes up to 5 tills and 5 staff, for a bigger team.
When is a POS more than you need?
If credit is the only thing you track, with no stock worth counting, no receipts, no staff and one person on the counter, a free khata app does the job and a POS is something you'd pay for and not use. A POS is worth it when one sale has to do several things: move stock, print a receipt, be visible to a second person and land on a customer's balance.
NexusTill records credit sales at the till in the same flow as cash, keeps a dated running balance for each customer with email reminders, deducts stock from the same entry, and keeps working when the connection drops. The trial is 7 days, needs no card to start, and doesn't turn into a paid plan on its own. That's enough time to run the five checks above at your own counter, with your own cashier, on your own connection.
If giving credit takes more taps than taking cash, the paper book will be back by the second month.
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Written by The NexusTill team.