Hardware and electrical store software for thousands of SKUs

Thousands of items, six ways to count them

Walk through any hardware or electrical shop and look at the units. Nails by the kilo. Wire by the coil and by the metre. Switches by the piece and by the box. Pipes by the length. Paint by the tin, the litre and the shade. A single product can arrive in one unit and leave in another, and every conversion is a chance for the stock figure to go quietly wrong.

The conversion problem

Take a 1.5 sq mm house wire. The distributor sells it by the coil of 90 metres, one customer wants 35 metres, and the next wants a whole coil. A billing app that treats a coil as a single unit cannot sell 35 metres without a workaround, and one that treats the item as metres does not know how many full coils you hold.

We build the item master with units that convert in both directions. You buy in coils and boxes, you sell in metres and pieces, and the stock shows both. Part coils and cut lengths are tracked as stock, so offcuts stop disappearing.

The contractor's account

In a hardware shop the contractors, electricians and painters are often the customers who matter most, and they are almost always the ones who buy on credit. They buy for several sites at once and settle in lumps. Each one needs a credit limit, a running balance, a site-wise statement and a warning when the limit is crossed.

When a contractor disputes one site's bill, you should be able to show it in seconds, not after an evening of turning pages. We tag every bill to a contractor and a site, and match part payments against specific bills.

Quotations, billing and reorder levels

• Quotations. A quote for a flat's wiring or a bathroom's plumbing is built from your item master at current rates, with a validity date and revisions, and converts into a bill when the customer says yes. Quotes with stale prices are flagged.
• GST billing. Fast counter search by name, code or brand, rates by customer type, and GST invoices your accountant can read without cleaning up.
• Reorder levels. Minimum stock per item, purchase suggestions by supplier, and a dead-stock list of items that have not moved in months.
• Paint. For paint dealers, the shade code, base and tinted quantity go on the bill, so a repeat order for the same shade can be matched.

Pricing, and the stores that can skip it

A billing, stock and credit system with unit conversion typically starts around ₹85,000, and a complete system with purchase, supplier payables and several counters costs ₹1,50,000 to ₹5,00,000. If you also want an online catalogue where contractors can browse and enquire, an e-commerce store typically starts around ₹35,000.

If you stock a few hundred items and sell nearly all of them in the unit you buy them in, a ready-made app will do the job. Custom billing software versus Vyapar lays out that comparison, and Google Sheets versus inventory software covers the spreadsheet route. We build for the store with thousands of items and many units. See our POS retail software and inventory management software pages, and wholesale distributors if you also sell to other dealers. We would load your fastest-moving items first and bring the long tail in over the following weeks. VS Tech Builders also gives a 14-day correction window after launch on every project, which is useful when a long item list throws up its first surprises.