Hardware & Sanitary Store
Mixed units, cut lengths and contractor credit — the three things a plain retail counter cannot handle.
A hardware and sanitary store breaks ordinary retail software in a specific place: the unit. Pipe sells by the foot but is bought by the length. Cement goes by the bag, nails by the kilo, fittings by the piece, and wire by the coil or the metre depending on who is asking. Then a mason wants eleven feet cut off a twenty-foot length, and the remainder is still your stock.
The second thing that breaks is credit. Much of this trade runs on contractors and masons buying through the month and settling later, with material often sent straight to a site. What gets built is scoped around your unit structure and your credit book, because those two decide whether the system is used or abandoned.
What it fixes
- Items bought in one unit and sold in another, so stock figures drift until nobody trusts them
- Cut-to-length sales leaving offcuts that are real stock but exist nowhere in the records
- Contractor and mason credit kept in a khata with no running view of who has crossed a sensible limit
- Thousands of fittings differing only by size, brand and thread, carrying no barcodes and known by different names depending on who is speaking
- Material sent to a site on a delivery note, then billed later from memory and sometimes not billed at all
- Shop stock and basement or godown stock counted as one, so a sale is promised on material nobody can reach today
What gets built
A starting point, not a fixed list. The build is scoped to your own process before anything is written.
Multi-unit items
Purchase unit, sale unit and the conversion between them defined per item — bundle to piece, coil to metre, bag to kilo — so one entry does not corrupt the other.
Cut and offcut handling
Selling a measured length out of a full one with the remainder kept as stock rather than silently lost. This is scoped to how your store actually treats remnants.
Party credit and limits
A khata per contractor, mason or builder with a running balance, ageing, and a visible limit at the moment of sale rather than at month end.
Searchable item master
Finding an item by size, brand, type or local name, including the second name your customers use for it, because very little of this stock carries a barcode.
Site delivery notes
Material issued to a site against a challan and convertible to an invoice later, so nothing leaves on a verbal instruction and stays unbilled.
Location and brand-wise stock
Stock by location and by brand with transfers recorded, so what you promise a customer matches what someone can actually fetch.
Who this is for
Hardware, sanitary, electrical and building-material stores where credit customers and mixed units are both normal, typically one shop with a godown up to a few outlets. It is most useful where the credit book has outgrown what the owner can recall and recovery has become a job of its own. It is not a fit for a small counter selling mostly cash to walk-in customers from a few hundred lines, and the multi-unit setup needs real effort at the start: somebody has to sit and define conversions for every item, and that work cannot be skipped or guessed.
Questions
Our item names are inconsistent and half the stock has no fixed name.
Then the first phase of the project is cleaning that up, and it is slower than people expect. We would rather say so before quoting than halfway through. A store with a messy item master gets more value from a smaller, well-built item list than from a large one entered in a hurry.
Can it stop a contractor buying past his credit limit?
It can warn or block at the counter, with an override that is recorded. Whether you want it to block is a business decision rather than a technical one — in this trade, refusing a long-standing party at the counter has consequences. Most owners prefer a visible warning and an override trail.
We do not keep formal accounts. Will this force us to?
No. It is built around the party khata you already keep, not around formal double-entry accounting. If your auditor needs full financial statements, that is a different build and this is not a substitute for it.
Tell us how your store runs.
We scope it first — what it takes, how long, what it costs. No obligation.