Stand at a kirana counter for ten minutes in the evening rush and count what happens. Dal weighed out loose into a paper packet. A shampoo sachet torn off a strip. A customer who says "likh lena" and walks out without paying, because the account settles on the 5th, the day after salary. And behind the counter, as often as not, a person who reads Hindi faster than English.
Plenty of billing software is written as if none of this exists. It assumes a barcode on every item, payment before the customer leaves, and an operator at ease in English menus. Software that ignores any one of these does not fail loudly. It fails at seven in the evening, when the queue is long and the old register comes back out from under the counter. What follows is the list of things to test, with the evening rush as the examiner.
Udhaar written in the same motion as the bill
The khata is why a kirana keeps its regulars against a supermarket's prices. For many shops credit is the default way people buy, so the test is not whether the software has a credit feature. It is whether udhaar can be recorded in the same motion as the bill. If credit lives in a separate app, or stays in the notebook while sales go into the computer, the two drift apart, and the drift is rarely in the shop's favour.
In Layerdots ERP a credit sale is made on the billing screen itself. The bill saves, the amount lands in that customer's running ledger, and a customer who is not in the system yet is created on the spot rather than after the rush. At month end the dues are a list of names, amounts and dates, and from the customer's page a payment reminder can be sent on WhatsApp with the outstanding figure already in the message. Running credit so the money comes back has its own article.
Dal by the 250 grams, oil into the customer's bottle
A large share of a kirana's fastest-moving stock has no barcode. Grains and atta weighed to order, oil poured into the customer's own bottle, spices in 100-gram twists, a strip of sachets sold one at a time. Software designed around a supermarket checkout treats these as edge cases. In a kirana they are the main case, so the quantity box has to take 0.25 and the price has to follow the weight without a calculator on the side.
For the packaged half of the shop there is a shortcut. The companion phone app pairs with the shop computer over your own Wi-Fi and uses the phone camera as a barcode scanner, so a scanner gun becomes an option rather than a requirement.
Menus in the language the person billing reads
The whole Layerdots interface runs in English, Hindi and Hinglish, and so does the help inside the app. Hinglish deserves the explanation. Plenty of staff speak Hindi but read Latin letters faster than Devanagari; it is how most shop WhatsApp messages are typed. Hinglish mode is that: Hindi words, English letters. Language at a counter is whatever produces the fewest wrong keys under pressure. A menu misread in a hurry becomes a wrong quantity or a wrong rate, and a billing mistake is a money mistake.
The help matters as much as the menus. When something confuses a new person at 8 pm, the answer has to be inside the app, in the language they read, rather than in an English PDF nobody opens. The in-app help is written in all three languages, question by question.
Staff logins follow the same thinking. Each person gets a login of their own, an admin ticks which parts of the app it can open, and phone-app sign-in is allowed per person. Expenses are a separate permission, so rent and salaries stay off a counter clerk's screen. And because new staff make mistakes in every language, a deleted bill is not gone: deleted bills, purchases and expenses sit in a recycle bin and can be restored for 30 days.
Six in the morning, computer off, milk crates at the door
A kirana does not keep office hours. The computer is off when the milk arrives, and the owner is at the mandi while the shop is selling. The phone app covers this in two ways.
On the shop's Wi-Fi it pairs with the computer by scanning a QR code and then works with no internet at all: stock lookup from the aisle, today's sales, camera barcode scanning, and photographing supplier invoices straight into the computer.
With the shop's opt-in it goes further. The phone can create real, final invoices even when the computer is unreachable, whether switched off, crashed or at the other end of town. These are not drafts to be fixed later. They are numbered off the same shared series the computer uses, so two devices can never issue the same bill number. The requirements, plainly: this mode needs Cloud Sync switched on and automatic invoice numbering, it is off by default, and while it is on both the phone and the computer need internet to bill. Billing from the phone when the computer is off goes into the detail.
The distributor's forty-line bill
Distributor bills arrive all week, forty lines of items, packs and rates, normally typed in by hand after closing. In Layerdots you photograph the supplier's invoice, from the phone or the computer, and the lines are read into a purchase entry for you to check and save. Each page counts as one scan: the trial includes 10, Basic 50 a month, Gold 80, Platinum 200, and extra scans cost ₹1.60 each on any plan. The reading step is the one part that needs internet; the photo itself travels over shop Wi-Fi.
Where the books live
A paper khata has one underrated property. It is yours. It sits in your drawer and asks nobody's permission. Layerdots keeps that property in software: billing, stock, reports and backups all run on your own computer with no internet, and the data stays in a folder you can see and copy. How that works, and what it asks of you in return, is written up separately.
What it costs
Three yearly plans, GST stated up front. Basic is ₹3,800 + GST = ₹4,484 a year for one shop with 50 invoice scans a month. Gold is ₹7,000 + GST = ₹8,260 for up to two shops and 80 scans. Platinum is ₹11,000 + GST = ₹12,980 for up to six shops and 200 scans. Details are in the pricing section. Before any of that, the seven-day trial has full features, no card and no online account, and the loose-items test above costs twenty minutes.
Two questions that come up
Does the phone app need internet?
Not on the shop's Wi-Fi. Pairing is by QR code, and stock lookup, today's sales, camera
barcode scanning and invoice photos all work with no internet. Creating final bills from the
phone while the computer is off is different; that needs internet on both devices and the
Cloud Sync opt-in.
We already keep a paper khata. Why change?
Keep it as long as it works. What the software's ledger adds is that udhaar is recorded in the
same motion as the bill, one entry instead of two books to reconcile, and month-end dues
become a ready list with names, amounts and dates rather than a second round of
bookkeeping.