A wholesaler's billing day looks nothing like a retailer's. Twenty bills instead of two hundred — but each one is a document another business will file, claim input credit against, and pay in three weeks. The buyer has a GSTIN and expects to see it printed correctly. The goods leave on a tempo, and the driver needs an e-way bill before the gate. And the money is not in the drawer; it is spread across forty ledgers. Software written for a retail counter tends to treat all of this as an afterthought. Layerdots ERP has a wholesale mode where it is the point.
Here is that day, piece by piece — the B2B invoice, the e-way bill, the credit, and two counters billing on one licence. Including the one caveat in that last part which we would rather tell you now than have you discover on a busy morning.
Your buyer's accountant reads this invoice too
Choose Wholesaler / Distributor as the business type during setup and the app arranges itself around B2B work. Bills carry the buyer's GSTIN, GST is calculated per line with each item's own rate and HSN, and the reports section puts the B2B view ahead of B2C: sales to registered buyers, party-wise and GSTIN-wise, with receivables aging alongside.
Month-end is where a B2B invoice earns its keep. Layerdots builds the actual GSTR-1 upload artefacts — the portal JSON (version GST3.1.7) and the Offline-Tool Excel with the HSN Table 12 sheets — and runs a pre-flight check on the period and GSTIN before you file. What your accountant receives is what the portal expects, not a spreadsheet somebody still has to convert.
The e-way bill, without typing the invoice twice
Under Rule 138 of the CGST Rules, moving goods worth more than ₹50,000 needs an e-way bill — per the NIC's own e-way bill portal documentation at ewaybillgst.gov.in, as of August 2026. For movement within your own state the threshold varies: state-wise guides published by IndiaFilings and Cashfree, both current for 2026, list ₹1 lakh intra-state limits in states including Maharashtra and Delhi — and the two lists do not agree on every state, so check your own state's notification rather than a blog, ours included.
The familiar routine is the painful part. Save the invoice in your billing program, then open the NIC portal and type the same invoice again — GSTIN, items, values, vehicle. Two chances to transpose a digit, and a mismatch between the two documents that surfaces at the roadside — the one place you cannot fix it.
In Layerdots, the e-way bill starts from the saved invoice. The details are read off the bill itself — so the e-way bill and the printed invoice always reconcile — and sent through the NIC-connected API. The EWB number comes back, is stored on the bill, and prints on the invoice. No second round of data entry, no second document to keep in sync with the one in the customer's hand.
Credit spread across forty buyers
Retail credit is one register. Wholesale credit is a different animal — many buyers, each with a running balance, some settling at 15 days and some at 60. Credit sales go into each buyer's ledger, and the B2B report shows receivables aging party-wise: who owes what, and for how long. The morning's collection calls come off a list, not out of anyone's memory.
A wholesale counter also usually means staff. Admins create staff logins with per-feature permissions — expenses are a separate permission, so salaries and rent stay out of a counter clerk's view, and phone-app sign-in can be allowed per user. Everyone bills under their own name, which matters the day a bill needs explaining.
The inward side: forty-line purchase invoices
Wholesale is not just outward bills. The stock arrives with invoices as long as the ones you issue, and somebody has to get those forty lines into the system before the goods can go out again. In Layerdots you photograph the supplier's invoice and AI reads the items into a purchase entry for you to check and save — 200 to 1,500 scans a month depending on plan. The photo can come from the phone app, which pairs with the shop PC over your own Wi-Fi with a QR code and needs no internet at all: stock lookup from the godown, today's sales, barcode scanning by camera, and supplier invoices photographed straight into the PC while the cartons are still on the floor.
And because a busy counter mis-clicks, deleted bills, purchases and expenses go to a recycle bin and can be restored for 30 days before they are purged. A wrong delete at dispatch time is an annoyance, not a hole in your books.
Two counters, one licence, one invoice series
Volume days need two billing points — dispatch at the gate, the owner at the desk. In Layerdots you activate the same licence key on a second PC and connect it to your shop: the full shop downloads to the second computer, and from then on bills, stock and customers sync both ways. Both computers share one invoice number series, so two bills can never get the same number — which matters, because a duplicated invoice number in a GST return is not a small tidy-up.
Now the caveat, plainly: in two-PC mode, both computers need internet to bill. The shared number series is coordinated over the connection — that is precisely what stops the two machines from clashing — and it cannot be done blind. A single-PC shop remains fully offline: billing, stock, reports and backups with no internet at all, as we wrote about here. If your connection is unreliable, weigh that trade before you switch on the second counter. One practical note besides: the second PC connects from a fresh, empty shop, so join it to your shop before anyone starts billing on it separately.
And if your counter is half retail, half B2B — a hardware shop billing walk-ins in the morning and contractors in the afternoon — that mixed day has its own post.
Common questions
We are on the composition scheme. Can it print a Bill of Supply?
Yes. Set the GST Registration Type to Composition (Settings → Shop Details, or during initial
setup) and sales print as a Bill of Supply with no GST charged. In place of
a sales GST report you get a composition tax view showing 1% of turnover — the composition rate for
traders under Section 10 of the CGST Act, per the CBIC's composition scheme pages, as of
August 2026 — the figure you file through the quarterly CMP-08 statement.
Which plan do e-way bills need?
Generation from the saved invoice is on Gold (₹7,000 + GST = ₹8,260/yr) and Platinum
(₹11,000 + GST = ₹12,980/yr). Basic (₹3,500 + GST = ₹4,130/yr) keeps the free manual field —
generate on the government portal and enter the number on the bill. Full details are on the
pricing page.
Does the two-computer mode work without internet?
No, and we would rather say so here than in a support call. One PC works fully offline; two
PCs sharing one shop both need internet to bill, because the shared invoice number series is
what keeps them from colliding.
Windows or Mac?
Both, and one licence covers both — there is a native Mac build,
written up here. There is a
7-day free trial — no online account, no card. One thing the trial does not
include is one-click e-way generation (that is Gold/Platinum); the free manual e-way field
works during the trial.