Billing and khata at the counter

The mart billed on a computer and kept its credit customers in a notebook beside the till. A regular customer would take goods on udharo, the cashier would print the bill and then write the amount in the book.

That made two ledgers. The billing software knew what was sold, and the notebook knew who owed what. When a customer questioned a balance, the staff had to match handwritten lines against printed bills.

We moved the mart onto Sajilo Billing, our cloud billing and point of sale, with the khata inside the same screen the cashier already uses.

• Barcode billing on every till. Any number of counters bill at once against the same stock.
• Nepali bills by default. Cart totals carry VAT and the Bikram Sambat date.
• The payment rails customers use. Cash, Fonepay QR, eSewa, Khalti and ConnectIPS are taken at the counter.
• Udharo in the bill. A credit sale is recorded against the customer's khata as part of billing, with no second entry.

1. The cashier scans the items as for any other sale.
2. The sale is marked as udharo against the customer.
3. The bill prints and the customer's khata balance updates in the same action.
4. When the customer pays later, the payment is recorded against the same khata.

The balance the cashier sees is the balance the owner sees. There is nothing to copy across at closing time.

Software alone does not retire a notebook. Staff keep the book for as long as they trust it more than the screen.

So the khata had to be faster than writing. Finding a customer and marking a sale as credit takes less time at the till than opening the book, and the balance is visible before the customer asks for it.

The mart now has one ledger. Disputes are settled by looking at the customer's khata, where every credit sale and payment is listed with its bill.

The owner put it this way:

Counter staff stopped keeping a parallel notebook. The udharo khata in the app is now the only ledger we argue about.