Most businesses don’t think about Purchase Order vs Invoice until an invoice arrives that doesn’t match what was agreed upon. A retailer ordered ₹4 lakh worth of inventory over WhatsApp. Thirty messages deep in a group chat, sandwiched between a supplier’s Diwali greeting and a blurry product photo. The supplier delivered everything. A month later,…
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It’s a Tuesday, and a wire transfer from your new overseas client is sitting in limbo. The bank won’t release it until you hand over your LEI. Your what? You have a PAN. You have a GSTIN. You’re fairly sure there’s a CIN somewhere in your incorporation papers. But an LEI is a new one,…
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A business owner once asked me why his Profit & Loss statement looked different every single month — even though his sales were steady, his team hadn’t changed, and his expenses were predictable. The issue wasn’t the report. It wasn’t the software. It wasn’t even his accountant. It was his Chart of Accounts. Over three…
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Last Tuesday, a garment exporter in Surat told me something that stuck: “I had ₹18 lakhs in outstanding invoices and couldn’t pay a ₹3 lakh fabric bill. My business was profitable on paper. My bank account said otherwise.” That gap — between what customers owe you and what you owe suppliers — is the single…
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A distributor processing hundreds of invoices every month should be able to answer four basic questions at any given moment: Which customers owe money? Which products are moving fastest? Which inventory is sitting idle? Which items need reordering? Most can’t. Not because they lack data. Because inventory lives in one spreadsheet, invoicing in another, receivables…
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A business owner once told me: “I check my bank balance every day. Isn’t that enough?” A few weeks later, he discovered one customer accounted for almost 40% of his unpaid invoices. The information was already sitting inside his reports. He just wasn’t looking at the right ones. That’s more common than most business owners…
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A wholesaler once told me: “We’re selling more than ever, but I still don’t trust my numbers.” The problem wasn’t sales. The problem wasn’t inventory either. It was that inventory, invoicing, GST, receivables, and accounting were all being managed in different places. Five spreadsheets, two registers, one Tally installation nobody fully understood, and a WhatsApp…
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A business owner I worked with checked his bank balance every morning. Every single morning. Coffee in hand, phone open, refreshing the banking app like it was a cricket score. Sales were healthy. Invoices were going out on time. Customers seemed happy. But cash was always tight. When we finally sat down and pulled his…
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Last month, I spent two days inside a mid-sized electronics store in Pune trying to figure out why their inventory numbers were off by ₹3.2 lakhs every quarter. The owner was convinced it was a pilferage problem. He’d installed cameras. Hired a night guard. Even started doing surprise stock checks on weekends. Turns out, nobody…
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