Ledgware – Shop Manager: Khata, Billing & Stock

Spend one evening in a small shop and watch how the owner closes his day. There is a khata register near the counter, thick and soft at the corners from years of thumbs. There is a bill book, half finished, carbon paper still inside. And there is a third record that exists nowhere on paper: the stock in his head. He knows roughly how many cartons are left in the back room. Roughly. Every shopkeeper I have ever met runs these three records at the same time, and every one of them has a story about the day the three stopped agreeing with each other.

Ledgware is the app I built to put those three records in one place. Khata, billing and stock, together in a single app on the phone that is already in the shopkeeper's pocket. It runs on Android 7.0 or higher, it is 34 MB, and it works completely offline, because a sale cannot wait for the internet to come back.

Why the three belong together

In a real shop, these jobs are not separate, even when the notebooks are. Think about an ordinary sale on credit. A customer takes goods on udhaar. In that one moment, three things happen: the stock on the shelf goes down, the customer's khata goes up, and a bill is born. If you record two of the three and trust memory for the last one, the mistake does not show up immediately. It shows up at night, or at month end, or in an argument at the counter.

So in Ledgware, a sale is one action. You bill the items, and the stock adjusts itself. You put part of the bill on khata, and the customer's ledger updates itself. Nothing is typed twice. Nothing depends on somebody remembering to copy a number from one book into another after the rush is over.

The khata side, in detail

Every customer has a ledger, and every supplier has one too. When you give udhaar, it goes into the customer's ledger with the date and the bill behind it. When a payment comes in, that goes in as well. Half payments are normal in shop life, so they are normal here too: pay part today, and the rest stays visible with the date it was promised for.

You can also set a credit limit for a customer. This sounds like a small thing until you have watched one friendly customer slowly absorb the whole cash of a small shop, ten small purchases at a time. The limit is a quiet guardrail. The app shows you when someone is close to it, and you decide what to do, like always. The app keeps the record; the judgement stays yours.

One rule I kept strict: old khata entries are never edited or quietly deleted. If a mistake happens, and mistakes happen in every shop, you add an adjustment entry that sits next to the original, with its reason written on it. Anyone looking at that ledger later can see the full story. A khata that can be silently rewritten is worse than paper, because paper at least shows the scratch marks.

When a customer asks what he owes, and they ask often, you do not flip pages. You open his ledger, and if he wants it on his own phone, his statement becomes a PDF in seconds, ready to send on WhatsApp. The whole balance discussion takes less time than making tea.

Billing at the counter

The billing screen is a proper point of sale. Search a product by name, or scan its barcode, tap the items, and take the money. It accepts the ways people actually pay: cash, card, mobile wallet, bank transfer, and the very common mixture, part cash and part on khata. That mixture is where paper bill books suffer most, and it is the case this screen was designed around.

If a customer walks back into the shop to grab one more thing, you do not keep his bill open on the counter and block the next person. You hold the bill, serve the next customer, and call the held bill back when he returns. Every completed bill becomes an invoice, and the PDF is made inside the phone itself, in A4 size for printing or the small thermal size for a receipt printer. No internet, no waiting, no separate software.

Stock that keeps its own count

On the stock side, every product carries the prices your shop actually uses: retail, wholesale, and bulk, if you sell that way. Products with sizes or colours keep those variants. Goods that expire can be kept in batches with their expiry dates, so the older batch sells first and nothing dies quietly on the back shelf.

The app builds the lists a shopkeeper otherwise builds in his head at midnight. Low stock. Finished stock. And a separate list I care about a lot: dead stock, the items that have not sold in a long time. Dead stock is money sleeping on a shelf. Seeing it written in a list, with the amount stuck in it, changes what you order next month.

Reorder suggestions come from your own selling speed, not from a fixed number somebody guessed. A fast-moving item warns you earlier than a slow one. And when stock runs low on something you sell every day, you hear about it from the app before you hear about it from a customer standing at an empty shelf.

Purchases work in the same flow as sales. Goods arrive from a supplier, stock comes in, and the supplier's khata updates in the same step, including the awkward case where the delivery arrives short. If you physically count a shelf and the count differs from the app, you record an adjustment with a reason, counted stock, damaged, whatever is true, instead of overwriting the number. The movement history stays readable.

Money at the end of the day

There is a daily cash register, a cashbook, and a place for expenses, because the sale total is never the whole story of a day. Rent day, a delivery rider to pay, a bulb that fused, these small outgoings decide whether the month felt good or bad. The profit and loss screen pulls sales, purchases and expenses together, and reports can be exported as PDF or Excel when you need them outside the phone, for a partner, an accountant, or your own records.

The dashboard is the screen you will open most. It shows today's sales, the total khata due, how much of it is overdue, the value of your stock, and one Business Health score that sums up the shop's condition in a single number. There is also a sync status screen one tap away, and tapping the shop name at the top switches between branches, with every number on the dashboard re-scoped to the branch you picked.

Staff, branches and permissions

If you have staff, they do not all need to see everything. Roles decide who sees what: a cashier's screen is a cashier's screen. Sensitive actions, like a large refund, can be set to wait for the owner's approval. And there is an activity record of who did what, and when. Not because staff are suspects. Because when a number looks wrong, "let us check" is a much better sentence than "who did this".

For shops with more than one branch, stock, sales and expenses stay separate per branch, and stock transfers between branches are recorded like everything else. The account screen in settings holds your profile and sign out, and the app opens with a demo shop called Fresh Mart, fully loaded with sample data, so you can practise every screen before trusting it with your real shop. The demo data is marked as demo, and you can remove it and start empty whenever you are ready.

Offline first, sync when you want it

The whole app works without internet. Sales, khata, stock, invoices, reports, everything. If a shop wants the same data on more than one phone, there is a backend for cloud sync that goes with it. I will be straight about its state: the backend is complete and ready to deploy, and the shop chooses where to host it. The app does not need it to function. If the same record is changed on two phones, the app shows both versions and lets a person choose. It never decides alone, and money records are never overwritten by sync. Once written, they stay written.

There are Free, Pro and Business plans for shops of different sizes. One more honest line: payments for the plans are in test mode right now, as no payment provider is connected yet. And whichever plan a shop is on, its own data is never locked away from it. That was a rule from the first day of this project, not a feature added later.

Getting started

Download the app from the link on this page and install it. Open the demo shop first and make a few practice sales, one cash, one on khata, and watch the dashboard and the customer ledger move. When it feels familiar, remove the demo, add your real products and your real customers, and start the day fresh. Taking a backup is built in, and restoring it brings your khata and stock figures back exactly as they were.

Not every shop sells from shelves, of course. If your work is stitching rather than stocking, the tailoring shop app I made covers that trade. And after closing time, the WhatsApp sticker app is the lighter side of this same site. Ledgware is the serious tool of the three. It is for the person who closes the shop at night and wants the numbers to agree before he turns the key.

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