Looking for an udhaar book alternative? Read this first

Should I switch away from my khata app?

Only if your problem has moved outside credit. Digital khata apps in Pakistan do one job — tracking who owes you what, dated and totalled — and they do it well, usually for free, on a phone, with no setup. If credit tracking is all you need, switching to POS software means paying monthly for machinery you won't use. You should look at an alternative when the shop has picked up problems a credit ledger cannot see: stock that runs out without warning, staff who need their own logins, customers asking for tax invoices, or a second counter. Those are billing and inventory problems, not khata problems.

So the useful question isn't "is there something better than my khata app". It's "has my problem changed shape".

Give the khata apps their due

It's worth saying plainly, because the internet is full of comparison pages that won't. Udhaar Book and the other Pakistani khata apps took on a genuine, widespread problem — the paper register, which was costing shops real money in torn pages and blurred dates — and made a free, phone-first answer to it. A free app that gets a small shop onto a dated, totalled, backed-up ledger is a good thing, and we're not going to pretend otherwise to sell software.

We also won't list their features and mark them wrong. We haven't audited their product, their roadmap moves, and any table we drew would be out of date and probably unfair. What follows compares NexusTill against the general shape of a credit-only app — not against any specific competitor's feature list.

Who should stay on a khata-only app

Stay if this describes your shop. There's no prize for using heavier software:

• You only need to know who owes what and since when. No stock questions, no billing questions.
• You don't keep an inventory that matters — you buy what you sell, or your stock is small enough to see from where you stand.
• You never print a receipt or issue an invoice, and no customer has ever asked for one.
• One person runs the counter, so there's no argument about who wrote what.
• You're on a phone, in a small shop, and a monthly fee would be a real cost against a thin margin.

If that's you, close this page and keep your money. Software you don't need is not an investment; it's a subscription and a login for a problem you don't have.

When does a shop outgrow a credit-only app?

A shop outgrows a khata-only app the moment the questions it's asking stop being about money owed and start being about goods, people or paperwork. There are four specific triggers, and most shops hit them in this order.

1. Stock starts running out without warning

A credit ledger tracks rupees, not shelves. It has no idea you're down to two bags of atta, because it never saw the items. Once you're finding out you're out of something from a customer asking for it, you need software that watches stock as you sell — and that means the sale has to carry its line items, which is the thing a khata entry doesn't have.

2. Somebody else is on the counter

One ledger with one owner is simple. Two people entering credit on a shared phone is where the trust goes. What you need at that point is separate accounts with separate roles — so you can see who recorded what, and so a cashier can take money without being able to see your margins. NexusTill puts staff accounts and roles on Growth at Rs 6,999 a month, up to 5 tills and 5 staff.

3. A customer asks for a tax invoice

This one arrives suddenly, usually from a business customer who needs it to claim input tax. A khata entry can't become an invoice — there are no line items, no tax breakdown, no seller and buyer details. If you sell to businesses at all, you'll need software that can issue both a quick receipt for the walk-in and a proper tax invoice from the same sale.

4. There's a second counter, or a second shop

The moment stock and credit exist in more than one place, you need them to roll up. Multi-branch, warehouses and stock transfers between branches sit on NexusTill's Scale plan at Rs 11,999 a month. If you're one shop with one till, you don't need that tier and shouldn't buy it.

What you get by moving, and what it costs

Here's the honest trade. You gain the things a credit ledger structurally can't do; you give up free, and you take on a bit of setup. NexusTill's Starter plan is Rs 2,999 a month and covers one till and two users — you and one other — with unlimited products and customers, barcode scanning, inventory with low-stock alerts, quick and tax invoices, the customer credit ledger with email reminders, the daily cash-up, offline billing and 90 days of report history. The AI assistant is not on Starter; it starts on Growth at 30 questions a day and goes to 100 on Scale.

• You gain: itemised credit sales, stock that moves as you sell, receipts and tax invoices, one shared ledger for staff, and reports that can tell you which items make money.
• You give up: free. And you spend an evening entering your regular customers' opening balances and your fast-moving products.
• What doesn't change: udhaar still works the way it always did. You still give credit, still record payments, and the balance is still dated automatically.

If you do move, move gently

Don't type in history. Carry today's balances across as opening amounts, run new sales in one place from tomorrow, and keep the old app open as a reference for a fortnight. Compare a few balances at the end of that. If they agree, you're done, and if they don't, you'll find out while the old record is still sitting right there.

NexusTill's trial is 7 days, needs no card to start, and doesn't convert into a paid plan by itself. That's deliberately long enough to run your real udhaar and your real stock through it for a week — which is the only comparison that actually settles this.

Don't switch because something newer exists. Switch because your shop started asking a question your current tool was never built to answer.

Written by The NexusTill team.