A pharmacy bill is not a grocery bill. The same tablet sits on the shelf in three batches with three expiry dates. GST is a rate per line rather than one rate for the bill. The customer is buying on a doctor's slip, often on credit, month after month, and the bill they take away has to carry particulars a grocery receipt never needs. Software that prints totals and stops there is a calculator with a printer.
Layerdots ERP started behind a pharmacy counter, so this is the shortest of our checklists: what a medical store has to have, and how the app handles each point.
Three batches of the same tablet, three expiry dates
Every item is tracked batch by batch, each batch with its own expiry. Stock lookups at the counter, and from the phone app in the aisle, show the batch in hand and its date. The expiry report lists what is approaching its date while there is still time to sell it or return it to the stockist, and the dead stock report lists what has quietly stopped selling, so capital does not sleep on a shelf. Expired stock that cannot be returned has a GST consequence of its own, covered in GST on expired stock and ITC reversal.
The bill is A5, and it carries the doctor's name
Search by name or scan a barcode, set the quantity, save, print. The counter queue is the whole design brief. Invoices default to A5, the half sheet pharmacies use, with A4 and thermal rolls a setting away. The printed bill carries the batch and expiry against each line, the drug licence number from the shop profile, and the prescribing doctor's name, which is kept on the customer record and copied onto each bill so it prints as it stood that day. Credit sales go into the customer's running ledger, so month-end dues are a list rather than a memory. Why pharmacies settle on A5 is covered with the other paper sizes.
GST per line, and a GSTR-1 your CA can upload
Each item carries its own GST rate and HSN code, so a bill that mixes rates totals correctly without anyone doing arithmetic on the side. At month end the reports section produces the GST summaries and the GSTR-1 upload files themselves, the portal JSON and the Offline Tool Excel with the HSN summary sheets, checked for the period and GSTIN before you file. What your accountant receives is what the portal expects, not a register to be rebuilt in a spreadsheet. The HSN summary in Table 12, the sheet most likely to bounce, has its own article.
The stockist's thirty-line invoice
Purchase entry is where pharmacy evenings go: thirty lines of items, batches and expiry dates, typed by hand. In Layerdots you photograph the stockist's invoice from the phone app or the computer, and the lines are read into a purchase entry for you to check and save, with the batches and expiry dates on them. Each page counts as one scan. The trial includes 10 scans, Basic 50 a month, Gold 80, Platinum 200, and extra scans cost ₹1.60 each. Scanning needs internet; the rest of the app does not.
When the connection drops
Billing, stock, reports and backups all run with no internet at all, and the data lives on your own computer; the reasons for that are set out separately. The phone app pairs over the shop Wi-Fi for stock checks and billing from anywhere in the shop, and staff logins with per-feature permissions decide who can see purchases and profit and who can only bill.
Two questions that come up
Is there a separate pharmacy edition?
No. Pharmacy is a business type inside the app. Choose it and the pharmacy defaults are on: A5
invoices, batch and expiry fields, the doctor on the customer, the drug licence on the bill.
Retail and wholesale shops use the same app with their own defaults.
What does it cost?
Seven days free with full features, no online account and no card. After that, Basic is
₹3,800 + GST = ₹4,484 a year, Gold ₹7,000 + GST = ₹8,260, Platinum ₹11,000 + GST = ₹12,980.
The plans differ in invoice scans per month and number of shops, and the
pricing section has the detail. The same app runs on Windows and on
Mac.