What does it mean for a POS to properly support udhaar?
Proper udhaar support means you can finish a sale as credit in the same flow you'd take cash — pick the customer, mark it credit, done — and the software then keeps a running per-customer balance that updates itself on every sale and every payment, with every entry dated automatically. Anything less specific than that is a checkbox. If completing a credit sale means leaving the till screen, opening another section, or typing the customer's name and amount a second time, credit isn't in the sale; it's beside it, and your cashier will stop bothering within a fortnight.
Why "supports credit" is nearly meaningless on a feature list
POS software written for markets where credit is rare tends to treat it as an accounts-receivable feature — something the office deals with after the fact. That's fine 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 path everyone avoids.
The failure mode 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 neither is trusted — which is exactly the situation the POS was bought to end.
The five things to check before you buy
Test these on the actual till screen, not in a slide deck. Each one is a yes or no.
- 1Can you complete 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, it will lose.
- 2Does each customer carry a running balance that updates itself from the sale — with no separate entry and no re-typing of the amount?
- 3Is every entry date-stamped automatically, so an old debt visibly looks old and "kuch mahine pehle" stops being an argument?
- 4Can a credit sale be partly paid? Half now, half on the book is normal, and software that forces all-or-nothing will be worked around immediately.
- 5Does the credit sale still work with the internet off? Credit doesn't wait for a signal, and the sale that fails offline is the one that ends up on paper.
The month-two test
Any POS demos well on udhaar. The real question is whether your cashier is still using it in month two, or whether a notebook has quietly reappeared next to the till. Credit that isn't as fast as cash always loses to paper — not because anyone decided to, but because a queue decides for them.
Credit is a sale, not a payment type you ignore
The design point that separates good implementations from bad ones: a credit sale is a full sale. The items are recorded, the stock comes off the shelf, the day's sales total goes up, and the profit on those lines is calculable — the only thing that didn't happen is cash entering the drawer.
Software that treats udhaar as "a sale that didn't happen 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. And when the customer eventually pays, the payment gets recorded as a fresh sale, which double-counts your revenue and leaves the balance wrong in the other direction.
The right model is 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 you should be able to do afterwards
Recording credit well is only half of it. The other half is what the software can then tell you — which is the reason to have it in the POS at all rather than in a separate khata app:
- See who owes the most and who has owed the longest. That list is exactly who's worth a reminder this week.
- Open one customer and see the sales behind their balance, itemised and dated — so a disputed total is a conversation with a document, not a memory contest.
- Send a reminder without an awkward phone call. NexusTill's credit ledger includes email reminders on every plan.
- See the day's real total — cash plus credit — instead of judging the day by the drawer.
- Know whether your credit book is growing: udhaar given against udhaar recovered, over a few weeks.
Who should be allowed to give credit
Worth thinking about before you have staff. If more than one person is on the counter, the ledger has to be shared — one balance everyone sees — 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 accounted for. Growth at Rs 6,999 takes it to 5 tills and 5 staff, which is the tier for a bigger team.
Where a POS is more than you need
If credit is genuinely the only thing you're tracking — no stock worth counting, no receipts, no staff, one person on the counter — a free khata app does that job and a POS is machinery you'll pay for and not use. The POS earns its place when the same sale needs to do more than one thing: move stock, print a receipt, be visible to a second person, and land on a customer's balance.
NexusTill records the credit sale at the till in the same flow as cash, keeps a dated running balance per customer with email reminders, deducts the stock from the same entry, and keeps working when the connection drops. The trial is 7 days, no card to start, and it doesn't convert into a paid plan on its own — which is 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 win. Not immediately — just quietly, by the second month.
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Written by The NexusTill team.