Ask where your shop's data actually lives, and most modern software has the same answer: on our servers, reachable while your internet works and your subscription is paid. That answer has quietly become normal. We think that for a shop's books, it is the wrong answer.
Layerdots ERP is local-first. Everything you create in the app — sales and bills, inventory, purchases, customers, payments, reports — is stored on your own computer, in a folder inside Documents. You can see the folder. You can copy it. It is yours in the plainest possible sense: it is on your machine.
The day the internet is down, you can still bill
A shop counter cannot wait for a connection to come back. Billing, inventory, reports and backups in Layerdots all work with no internet at all — not a degraded offline mode, but the normal way the app runs. The internet is needed only for the optional extras: AI invoice scanning, Cloud Sync, and app updates.
This is also why there is no online account. You download the app, it runs, you bill. Nothing to register, nothing to sign into, no password to reset at nine in the morning with a queue at the counter.
What "your data" means when you can touch it
- Backups go where you choose — a pen drive, an external disk, another folder. The app makes proper backups you can restore from, and a delete-protection password guards against accidents.
- Moving computers is a backup and a restore — including from a Windows PC to a Mac. The data format is the same on both.
- No subscription hostage-taking. Your books are not held on a server that stops answering when a payment lapses. They are in your Documents folder either way.
The cloud, only when you ask for it
There is a Cloud Sync feature, and it is genuinely useful — it keeps the same shop available on more than one device, and the phone app can keep billing even when the shop computer is off. But it is off by default. Until you switch it on, nothing leaves your machine.
If you do enable it: your shop's records sync to our cloud database, hosted in India (Mumbai region), isolated to your own account. Delete something in the app and the cloud copy is permanently erased within 30 days. Switch sync off, and new changes stop being uploaded. The choice stays yours, both directions, at any time.
Why we built it this way
Layerdots is made for real Indian shop counters — pharmacies, retail, wholesale — where the connection drops, the power cuts, and the queue does not care. Software that depends on someone else's server for every bill is fragile in exactly the place a shop cannot afford fragility.
Local-first is not a limitation we accepted. It is the design: fast because the data is right there, private because it never left, and dependable because the only machine that has to be up is the one on your counter.