Your first 30 days on Kapda Stock: a week-by-week switching plan

The bahi khata has one real advantage over every piece of software ever written: it never asks you to set it up. You open it, you write, it works. Software asks for an hour before it gives you anything back — and the shops that struggle with that hour are almost always the ones that did the jobs in the wrong order, then had to redo them.

We see the same three failures again and again. Products entered before the tax settings were confirmed, so every HSN code had to be fixed one at a time. Customers added before their opening balances, so the ledger started from zero and quietly wrote off every rupee already on the khata. Staff invited on day one, so half the catalogue was entered twice in different spellings.

So here is the order that avoids all of it. One theme per week, an hour or two a day, while the shop keeps running exactly as it does now. Nothing here requires you to close for a day or stop writing in the book until you are ready. If you want the terse version to tick off, it is the onboarding checklist in the docs; this is the same sequence with the reasoning attached.

Before week one: decide who owns this

Setting up a shop’s software is a project, and projects with two owners have none. Pick the person who will do it — usually the owner or the eldest son or daughter working in the shop — and give them the Owner or Admin account. Everyone else joins in week four.

Two practical decisions are worth making now, because they are annoying to change later:

• Which plan. Growth allows the owner plus 3 team members, 1,000 products and 5,000 invoices a month; Professional allows the owner plus 5 team members, 10,000 products and 15,000 invoices. Count your real SKU list before choosing — a fabric shop with a hundred and twenty designs in eight colours is closer to 1,000 than it feels.
• Which device sits on the counter. One machine that stays on, stays logged in and runs POS all day. This matters more than you would think; it is also what makes offline billing work when the line drops.

Week 1 — get the shop’s identity right

Everything you set this week prints on every invoice and receipt for the next ten years. It is worth doing carefully and once.

Shop details

Name, GSTIN, phone, email and address — exactly as they should appear on a bill, not as shorthand. Go and look at a printed invoice from your existing system or your CA’s file and copy it. The Shop details page also carries the statement footer note, which prints at the bottom of customer statements; your payment terms and UPI ID belong there.

Invoicing settings — the ten minutes that matter most

Open Invoicing settings and set four things: the UPI ID that becomes the QR code on every receipt, the invoice prefix, the number format and the sequence digits. The form previews *Next invoice will be …* as you type, so you can see the result before committing.

The default `{PREFIX}-{FY}-{SEQ}` produces `INV-2026-0042`. Most Indian shops prefer `{PREFIX}/{FYSHORT}/{SEQ}` → `INV/26-27/0042` because it matches what their CA already expects. The sequence restarts every financial year and is never reused, so changing the format later does not renumber past invoices — but your CA will still prefer one consistent series, so settle it now rather than in November.

Taxes, before a single product exists

Confirm your default GST rates and read GST basics before you start the catalogue. This is the rework that hurts most, because a product’s HSN code, GST rate, unit and category cannot be edited once it is added. If one is wrong and the product has no sales yet, it has to be deleted and added again; once it has sold, it cannot be permanently deleted at all. Twenty minutes here avoids all of that. See HSN codes & GST rates — the textile range 5001–6310 is pre-loaded with a default rate per chapter, but garment rates can depend on sale value, so confirm them with your CA.

Week 2 — catalogue what you actually sell

This is the heavy week, and the one most people rush. Everything downstream — stock alerts, reorder suggestions, profit margins, the GST summary, the dead-stock list — is built on what you enter here. A catalogue entered carelessly produces reports that are confidently wrong, which is worse than no reports at all.

Categories first

Every new workspace starts with ten seeded categories. Rename them to match how your shop actually thinks — suiting, shirting, sarees, dupattas, readymade, unstitched — before you add a single product. Categories cannot be created by the bulk importer, so they have to exist first anyway.

The spreadsheet route

If you already have a list in Excel — and most shops do, somewhere — use Bulk import rather than typing. It is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight. Download the CSV template, fill one product per row, and import:

Valid rows import and invalid rows are listed with their row number and reason, so one bad row never blocks the rest. Fix those rows and import just them again — re-importing a row that already succeeded fails harmlessly with *SKU … already exists*. Files must be under 10 MB, and only the first worksheet of an Excel file is read.

Variants, not duplicates

Add colour, size and design as variants of one product rather than creating a separate product per shade. Variant-level stock is what makes the broken-size-set report work, what makes the low-stock alert tell you *which* colour ran out, and what stops your product count from burning through your plan limit five times faster than it needs to.

Work in passes, and start billing early

You do not need a complete catalogue to start. Do it in three passes: fast movers first, then the rest of the shelf, then the slow stock at the back. The moment your top sellers are in, you can start ringing up real sales on POS — the tail can be finished in the quiet hours between customers.

Enter opening stock as you go, and be honest about it. The count you type this week is the baseline every stock report is measured against forever. A number you guessed shows up six months later as a variance nobody can explain.

Week 3 — bring the customers, and the udhaar, across

Add your regulars — and this is the part that really matters — enter anyone who owes you money with their correct outstanding balance on day one. A ledger that starts at the right number is a ledger you can trust six months later. One that starts at zero quietly writes off every rupee already on the khata, and there is no way to discover that except by noticing that the numbers feel too good.

• Phone numbers in +91 format, because they are what WhatsApp reminders and receipts go to. A number stored loosely is a reminder that never arrives.
• Opening balance, marked *Owes us* for udhaar or *Advance* for money held on account. Opening balances are entered when you Clone customer — see Payments & credit — and become the first entry on the new ledger.
• A note of how old each balance really is. The aging report ages a credit from the day it was entered, so a year-old debt entered today starts in the 0–30 bucket. Keep your own list of genuinely old balances and follow those up personally rather than waiting for the ladder.
• A credit limit for the customers who need one. Set it before the festive season, not during it — at that point POS will warn at the counter instead of after the fact.

You do not have to enter everybody. Enter everybody who owes you money, plus the regulars you want reminders and statements for. A walk-in who buys twice a year can be added the next time they walk in.

…and your karigars, while you are at it

If you send fabric out for stitching, dyeing, embroidery or weaving, set up Job work in the same week. Add each karigar with their skill, then issue jobs against them: material goes out of stock when the job is issued, finished pieces come back in when it is received, and the agreed wages, weaving and washing charges land on that karigar’s own ledger as money owed.

The reason to do this in week three rather than "later" is simple: material sitting at a tailor’s workshop is otherwise indistinguishable from material you have sold. One is an asset, the other is revenue. Get that wrong for a month and your stock valuation is fiction.

Week 4 — hand it to your staff

Up to now this has been your project. Week four is when it becomes the shop’s.

Roles first, then module access

Invite your team from Inviting & managing members and give each person the role that matches what they actually do. The one thing that surprises people: POS needs the Manager role or above. Cashier and Salesman are read-only roles and cannot complete a sale, so anyone standing at a counter needs Manager.

Then tighten each person individually with the module access matrix. A salesman does not need the profit report; a counter Manager probably does not need supplier payments. The matrix only ever narrows what the role already allows, so you cannot accidentally grant somebody more reach than their role gives them.

The four connections

1. Printer — do a real test print from a POS receipt on each counter printer, not from a PDF. See Printing & PDF.
2. WhatsApp — connect your own Meta Cloud API number if you want messages to come from your shop rather than the platform number, and read the 24-hour rule before you rely on it.
3. Google Drive — connect backup so the nightly job runs without anyone remembering it.
4. Two-factor authentication — turn it on for the owner account now the setup rush is over. See Security & two-factor auth.

Finally, install the app on the counter device and on your phone. The counter device gets a window with no address bar to reload by accident; your phone gets the dashboard in your pocket.

“We gave it four weeks instead of one weekend. By the time the staff touched it, there was nothing left to go wrong.”

The one-sale test

Before you declare the switch done, run one loop end to end. Ring up one real product for a walk-in customer, print the receipt, then process a return of the same item.

That single loop touches POS, stock, the customer ledger, the day book and printing at once, and it shows you exactly what your staff will see every day. Check four things afterwards: the stock went down and came back, the day book shows the cash in and out, the receipt printed correctly, and the invoice number matches the format you chose in week one. If all four are right, you are live.

Coming from Tally or another billing app?

Not every shop is moving off paper. If you are leaving another billing program, the plan above still applies, with three adjustments that save a great deal of effort:

• Export, don’t retype. Nearly every billing program can export its item master and party list to Excel. Reshape the item export into the bulk import template columns, and use the party list as your checklist for week three.
• Pick a cut-over date and take balances as of that day. Opening stock and customer opening balances should both be the figures on the same evening. Mixing a stock count from Monday with balances from Thursday is how variances are born.
• Keep the old system read-only for past years. Do not try to import three years of historical invoices. Past years stay where they are for reference and audit; Kapda Stock starts from the cut-over date.

If your CA works in Tally, they do not have to change anything. Tally export hands them the data in the format they already reconcile in, so the switch happens at your counter without disrupting their month-end.

Your first month-end

The first month-end on new software is where confidence is either built or lost, so treat it as part of the migration rather than something that happens after it. Set aside one evening and walk through it deliberately:

1. Reconcile cash. Open the day book for the month. It only counts cash — UPI, card and bank receipts are in your sales and ledgers, not here — so compare it against the till, not the bank statement.
2. Read the aging report. Does the total outstanding match what you believe is on the khata? If it is far off, an opening balance was missed in week three, and now is the cheapest time to find it.
3. Run the pre-filing checks. Open GST & Compliance for the month. The checks flag malformed GSTINs, lines without HSN codes and tax that does not match the customer’s state — the typical errors of a first month.
4. Send your CA the pack, and ask them for one round of feedback on the format. Fix what they ask for once, and every month after is routine.

The five mistakes that cause all the rework

Condensed from a lot of migrations, in rough order of how much time each one costs:

• Entering products before confirming tax settings. HSN codes, GST rates and units cannot be edited after a product is added, so a wrong one means deleting and re-adding — the single biggest time sink in a migration.
• Starting customer ledgers at zero. The old udhaar silently disappears, and by the time anyone notices, the paper record has been thrown away.
• Creating a product per colour. It multiplies the catalogue, breaks size-set reporting and eats the plan’s product limit.
• Guessing opening stock. Every variance from then on is unexplainable, so nobody trusts the stock report and everyone goes back to counting shelves.
• Inviting staff in week one. Two people enter the same product with different spellings, and you spend week three merging duplicates.

What month two feels like

Quieter than you expect. The setup month is the price; what you buy with it is a shop that does a growing amount of its own admin. By the second month, a normal day looks like this without anyone doing anything:

Your CA gets a filing pack instead of a carrier bag of bills — we explain what that does and, just as importantly, what it does not do in What Kapda Stock really does about GST. Overdue udhaar starts collecting itself, which we pull apart in Never chase udhaar again. And when the festive rush arrives, you have a year of real numbers to plan from.

Start when you are ready, not on the first of the month

One last piece of advice: do not wait for a clean start date. Shops that plan to "begin from 1 April" usually begin from 14 April, having lost two weeks to waiting. The four weeks above are designed to run alongside a shop that is trading normally, with the paper book still open beside the screen until you trust what is on it.

The only genuinely irreversible thing here is the opening balances, and those are irreversible whether you enter them today or in June — so the sooner you start, the smaller the gap between your books and your khata. Set up a workspace, or talk to us first if you would like someone to look at your product list and tell you which plan it fits.