Bill faster, never run out of stock

Billing and stock belong together because every sale is a stock movement. When the counter bills in one tool and stock is counted in another, or by hand, the numbers drift apart within days. By the weekend nobody trusts the stock figure, fast sellers run out without warning, and slow ones pile up in the back room.

POS and inventory software closes that gap. The counter is where stock leaves, and the receiving desk is where it arrives, so both are recorded in one place as they happen. Returns, transfers between shops and stock counts update the same figures.

The result is a stock number you can act on: what to reorder, what to move to another shop, what to discount before it expires, and what has simply gone missing.

It pays off first at the counter on your busiest hour. A cashier who scans, weighs and takes UPI without typing codes or working out GST serves more people, makes fewer mistakes and closes the till with cash that matches the bills.

The second payoff is the stockroom. When reorder suggestions come from how fast each item really sells and how long each supplier takes to deliver, fast movers stay on the shelf and money stops sitting in slow ones.

The third is credit. Many shops in India sell on khata to trusted customers. A ledger for each of them, with a credit limit and polite WhatsApp reminders carrying a UPI link, brings in dues that a notebook lets slip.

The first decision is whether you need custom software at all. Many shops bill and stock the way most shops do, and a ready-made system, set up properly with your products, prices and hardware, serves them well.

Ember POS is our own inventory and POS billing software, in development, for retailers and distributors with one shop or many. It covers fast GST billing that works offline, stock across shops and warehouses, credit customers, batches and expiry, purchases and reorder suggestions. Businesses that want early access can ask through the form.

A custom build earns its cost when your trade has rules that ready-made tools handle badly: prices that follow a daily rate, products sold by weight, length and piece at once, distributor schemes, job work, or a link to your own ordering or factory software. Then we build around how you actually sell, and reuse what we have already built where it fits.

Every trade tracks different things, so the system has to as well. A grocery or supermarket needs weighing scales at the counter, loose items, offers such as buy-two-get-one, and batch and expiry on packaged goods. A pharmacy needs batch and expiry on every strip, with the earliest-expiring stock sold first.

Apparel and footwear need sizes and colours as variants of one product, with stock by size, so a shop knows it has the shirt but not in medium. Electronics and mobile shops record serial and IMEI numbers for every unit sold, for warranty and returns. Hardware stores sell the same item by piece and by box.

Distributors work differently again: separate retail and wholesale price lists, schemes and free goods, bulk billing for trade customers, credit limits and dues by customer, and e-way bills for consignments that need them. We start by watching your counter, so the system fits your trade rather than the other way round.

Every bill is a GST invoice: the right tax rate for each item, its HSN code, the split between CGST and SGST or IGST, and your GSTIN on the printout. B2B invoices carry the buyer’s GSTIN and can be issued as e-invoices where your business is required to.

Returns produce credit notes against the original bill, not a fresh sale with a minus sign. Purchases record the input tax on each supplier bill. At the end of the month your accountant gets sales by tax rate and HSN code, purchases and payments, ready to file and to send to Tally, so nothing is typed twice.

Outside India the same structure carries VAT or sales tax instead, with the invoice format your country expects.

A stock figure is only useful if people trust it. Every sale, return, purchase and transfer changes stock at the moment it happens, in the right shop. Transfers are sent from one location and received at the other, so stock in transit is visible rather than lost.

Counts happen shelf by shelf on an Android phone, a section at a time, without closing the shop. Any difference between the count and the system is recorded with a reason: damage, expiry, a billing mistake or a missing item. Over a few months those reasons show where stock really goes.

Reorder suggestions use each item’s actual rate of sale in each shop and each supplier’s delivery time, so the order you place on Monday matches what you will sell before the next delivery.

We need your product list, your prices and a day at your counter. The product list can start as a spreadsheet: names, prices, GST rates, HSN codes, sizes or variants, and barcodes where they exist. We help clean it up and print labels for anything without a barcode.

We also need your rules: who may give discounts and how much, how credit works, which offers you run, and how stock moves between your shops. And we need an opening stock count before go-live, which your team does with our counting app.

Finally, someone on your side who owns the system: usually the owner or the store manager, who approves the rules and tells us what the reports should answer.

The counter sits at the centre of your business, so the system connects outward. Dynamic UPI QR codes come from your payment gateway, with the exact amount and the payment matched to the bill. Card machines can pass the amount from the bill so nobody types it twice.

Stock can feed your online store and the marketplaces you sell on, so a sale at the counter and a sale online come out of one count. Sales, purchases and payments go to Tally or your accounting software. Customer bills and credit reminders go out on WhatsApp. A loyalty programme can read the bill and add points at the till, as we did for a supermarket chain in Ireland.

Before switching on, we agree a few measures with you. Usually they are the time to bill a typical basket, how far the system’s stock is from the shelf at each count, how often fast movers run out, how much money sits in slow stock, and how much credit is overdue.

We take a first reading during the pilot, beside your old method, and again each month after launch. The reports show you where the system helps and where it doesn’t yet: a section that still counts badly, a supplier who is always late, an item that never sells.

Switching over is planned so the counter never stops. One shop runs the system on real days first, beside the old method, until the stock and the cash agree. Then the other shops follow one by one, each with its opening stock counted and its staff trained at their own counter.

After launch we run it with you. GST rates, invoice rules and payment providers change, and the system changes with them. New shops, new product lines and new reports are added as you grow, and we are a message away on WhatsApp or email when a printer or scanner misbehaves.