GST billing, inventory, khata and business reports for Indian shops — built so the bill never waits for the network. Records are written to your device first; the cloud is somewhere to copy them, not somewhere you need permission from.
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Most billing apps are a website in a wrapper: no signal, no sale. HisabNova writes every record to SQLite on your own device first and treats the cloud as a place to copy them to. A basement shop, a village market, a power cut, an expired data pack — none of them stop a bill being raised, printed and handed over.
Everything left of the dashed line happens with no internet at all.
Sync order never changes the answer: stock is derived from immutable movements and ledgers are append-only, so devices converge whichever way round they meet.
The same ₹9,947 bill runs through every screen below and through every chart further down the page — so you can follow one real sale from the counter to the GST return.
Interface previews drawn from the app's own design tokens, layouts and demo dataset. Figures are a worked example, not a live shop.
HisabNova starts at the counter and follows the money all the way to the return you file. Rows you can't use are hidden, not greyed out — the app is shaped by your trade, your role and your device.
Search, scan or speak an item onto the bill. CGST/SGST or IGST is decided from the place of supply, cess is handled, and inclusive (MRP) pricing is unpacked correctly rather than approximated.
Twenty layouts from a ruled A4 tax invoice to an 80mm thermal roll, all printing the same stored figures. Pin your brand colour once and it follows you across every design; the typeface you never touched still follows each design's own intent.
Rice at ₹92 a kilo, wire by the metre, sweets by the gram. Quantity carries its unit and its decimals all the way through pricing, stock and the printed bill — no rounding a 2.5 kg sale up to 3.
PDF to WhatsApp, paper to the printer, or both. On a desktop counter, Print goes straight to the printer you chose once — no dialog between one customer and the next.
A sales return puts stock back, adjusts the tax, and shows against the bill it came from — so the customer statement says what actually happened rather than two unrelated numbers.
For restaurants and cafés: take a table's order, send it to the kitchen, and turn it into a bill when they ask for it. Shown only to shops that have a kitchen behind them.
Stock is never a number someone edits. Every change is a signed, reasoned movement — purchase, sale, return, damage, expiry, transfer — and the balance is the sum of them. A crash or a bad sync can't leave a counter half-updated.
Scan with the camera on a phone or a USB gun on the counter PC. Unlabelled stock — loose grain, repacked goods — gets a real in-store EAN-13 minted on the GS1 range reserved for internal use, so it can never collide with a manufacturer's code.
Medicines, dairy, cosmetics and food carry batch numbers and expiry dates. Sales consume first-expiring-first, and the expiry report tells you what to move before it's a write-off.
Stock balances per location, with transfers recorded as movements like everything else. Sell from the shop, hold the rest in the godown, and see both.
Size and colour for a garment shop, serial or IMEI capture for mobiles and electronics — turned on by your trade, invisible to shops that will never need them.
The app suggests an HSN from your own catalogue and a short table of common headings, then asks you to confirm. It never invents one — a wrong classification travels as far as a filed return before anybody notices.
Every credit sale, receipt and return posts to the customer's ledger inside the same transaction as the bill. Opening balance, running balance and closing balance — with a window that never resets the carry-forward.
The same computed statement drives the four tabs on screen, the PDF, the Excel file and the CSV — so the copy you read and the copy you send the customer can't disagree.
Take ₹400 against a ₹1,000 bill and the app records exactly that. Walk-ins get the same three modes as named customers — recording what happened beats refusing to record it.
A QR and an "open UPI app" button right where the money is being taken, for the amount being collected now — never the whole total. The note carries your shop's name, because that's what lands in the customer's bank statement.
See what's 0–30, 31–60 and 60+ days old, and send a polite WhatsApp nudge with the statement attached. Reminders are scheduled on the device, so they fire without a server.
Points, tiers and offers for the regulars who make up most of a small shop's turnover.
B2B and B2C split, rate-wise taxable and tax, HSN summary and document series — for this month, last month, this financial year or all of it. Exports as CSV your accountant can work with.
Outward supplies and tax payable summarised the way the form asks for them, reconciled against the same invoice rows that printed the bills.
Generate the IRN JSON and e-way bill payload in the schema the portal expects, ready to upload — with the validation done before you get there rather than after.
No floating-point anywhere near a rupee. Amounts are exact base-10 decimals stored as text, every rounding step is explicit, and split amounts are allocated so the parts sum back to the whole — no paise invented or lost.
Full backup, restore, CSV and Excel export of everything — never gated behind a plan, even after a subscription lapses. Charging for the exit from statutory books would be indefensible.
Financial rows are soft-deleted and versioned, so history survives a mistake, a sync conflict and an audit.
Record supplier bills, track what you owe, and let inward stock land in the ledger the same way sales leave it.
Rent, electricity, transport, wages — categorised, dated, and netted against sales so the profit figure means something. Cash and bank accounts with running balances.
Point the camera at a supplier's bill and on-device OCR reads it into a draft you confirm. The text recognition never leaves the phone.
"Do kilo chawal, ek mixer" — dictate items when both hands are full. Like OCR, what the machine heard is shown for confirmation before anything is saved.
Owner, admin, manager, accountant, cashier, salesperson, inventory manager, delivery staff, viewer. The matrix that guards the writes is the same one that shapes the screens, so a cashier is never shown a figure the app would then refuse to give them.
One device runs as hub, the others pair with a 6-digit code. Records centralise with no server, no subscription and no internet — and each device bills on its own invoice series so two offline tills can never mint the same number.
When two devices change the same record, nothing merges itself. The row is flagged, both versions are shown side by side, and only an owner or admin decides which survives — with an audit entry naming who chose.
Biometric or PIN to open the app, and a second owner-PIN gate on the handful of actions that can rewrite money — cancelling a bill, exceeding a discount limit, managing users, exporting. PINs are stretched with PBKDF2 and privileged hashes never replicate to a staff tablet.
Deactivate a dismissed employee on your own phone; their tablet stops being a till the next time the devices meet on the shop Wi-Fi.
Optional sign-in with Google or email turns on encrypted-in-transit cloud sync for off-site safety. Skip it and nothing about the app stops working.
One number out of 100 built from margin, receivable days, stock cover and expiry exposure — with the four figures behind it shown, not hidden. Tied to the profit permission, so it doesn't appear on a tablet left on the counter.
Sales by day, month, item, customer and category; profit and loss; receivables ageing; stock valuation. Exportable as PDF, Excel or CSV.
Ask questions about GST, pricing, cash flow or slow stock, grounded in a live snapshot of your own figures. It's told never to invent your numbers — only to reason from what the app gives it.
Low stock, expiring batches, overdue khata, GST filing dates. Scheduled locally so they fire whether or not the phone has signal.
Benchmark targets a small retailer can aim at, plus streaks and short practical tips for the habits that keep books current.
Print-ready PDFs for the press or WhatsApp — eight card designs, three calendar formats, thirteen hand-built Indian motifs, and a holiday table checked against real date arithmetic so a mistyped Diwali fails a test rather than a hundred printed calendars.
GST is not one rate applied once — it is an ordered pipeline where the sequence changes the answer. These figures follow the same ₹9,947 bill from the screens above, so nothing here is illustrative arithmetic.
Where the buyer is decides whether the tax is CGST + SGST or a single IGST. The taxable value and the total never change — only the split does.
CGST and SGST are each half the rate, rounded independently and then held equal by construction, as the law requires. Nil-rated, exempt, non-GST and zero-rated lines carry no tax at all — they are not "0%" arithmetic, they are a different category.
Swap steps 2 and 3 and a shop with an invoice-level discount pays the wrong tax. The sequence below is the one GST requires.
That identity is asserted by the test suite on every computed invoice, so a bill whose parts do not reconcile cannot be saved in the first place.
Basmati Rice, one month, in kilograms. Nothing writes a balance — the balance is what the signed movements add up to, so a crash or a sync mid-way cannot leave a counter half-updated.
Each movement carries a typed reason, and the sign has to match it — a "sale" that tried to add stock is rejected rather than recorded. Batch and warehouse balances are the same sum, narrowed.
The matrix that guards every write is the same one that decides what a screen shows. A cashier is never shown a margin the app would refuse to give them.
| Permission | Owner | Admin | Manager | Accountant | Cashier | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raise a bill | ● | ● | ● | — | ● | — |
| Cancel a bill | ● | ● | — | — | — | — |
| See purchase price | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | — |
| See profit & margin | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | — |
| Change selling price | ● | ● | ● | — | — | — |
| Exceed discount limit | ● | ● | — | — | — | — |
| Manage stock | ● | ● | ● | — | — | — |
| File / manage GST | ● | ● | — | ● | — | — |
| Manage users | ● | ● | — | — | — | — |
| Change settings | ● | ● | — | — | — | — |
Salesperson, inventory manager and delivery staff are three further roles not shown here. Six of these actions ask for the owner's PIN even when the role already allows them — cancelling a bill, exceeding a discount limit, managing users or the subscription, changing settings, and exporting reports.
One device listens; the others pair with it and reconcile every few minutes.
The tablet and the phone never talk to each other — the hub relays. That is why a star and not a mesh: a mesh would need every device to remember where every other one had got to.
A growing shop gets a second till before it gets a broadband line. HisabNova lets the devices reconcile over the shop's own Wi-Fi, so records centralise without a server, a subscription, or a signal.
Nothing was forked to reach the desktop. The billing core is identical everywhere; what changes is the hardware around it — and where a platform genuinely cannot do something, the row is hidden rather than left to fail in front of a customer.
| Capability | Android | iOS | macOS | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing, GST, stock, khata, reports | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invoice, receipt & label PDFs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Backup, restore, CSV & Excel | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Same-Wi-Fi team sync | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| UPI QR, WhatsApp, e-invoice JSON | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Barcode scanning | Camera | Camera | Camera + USB gun | USB gun |
| Print straight to a chosen printer | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Voice billing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Biometric unlock | Fingerprint | Face / Touch ID | Touch ID | Windows Hello |
| Bill scanning (OCR) | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Push notifications | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
English, Hindi, and the next nine Indian languages by native speakers — which is also close to the ranking by number of GST-registered small businesses. Urdu runs right-to-left, and the layout follows.
Each language is listed in its own script first, because that is the only label a reader who cannot read English can find.
Pick your trade once during setup. A tailor never sees kitchen orders; a restaurant never sees IMEI capture. The rule is hide-what-cannot-apply, not hide-what-is-unlikely — so a bookshop that does weigh something keeps the feature.
Kirana, hardware, bakery, dairy, jewellery — quantity by kilo, gram, litre or metre, with decimals that survive all the way to the printed bill.
Pharmacy, FMCG distribution, cosmetics, bakery, dairy — batch numbers, expiry dates and first-expiring-first consumption.
Mobile, electronics and auto parts — capture the unit's own number at sale, so a warranty claim can be traced back to the bill.
Garment and footwear — size and colour as real stock lines rather than notes in the item name.
Kitchen order tickets, table orders, and a bill raised from the order when the table asks for it.
Salons, freelancers and service providers — SAC codes, no stock to carry, and documents that read as services rather than goods.
Kirana · FMCG distributor · Wholesaler · Pharmacy · Garment · Electronics · Hardware · Restaurant · Bakery · Cosmetics · Stationery · Auto parts · Salon · Jewellery · Furniture · Dairy · Service provider · Freelancer · Online seller · General store
HisabNova has no sign-up wall and no analytics on your trading. The default state of the app is a complete, working till whose records exist in exactly one place: the device in your hand.
Open the app and start. An account only ever buys you optional cloud backup.
Bill scanning reads the photo on the phone. The image is not uploaded to be read.
PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 100,000 iterations and a random salt, plus an escalating lockout that survives a force-quit.
Backup, restore, CSV and Excel export work on every plan and after a subscription lapses. Your statutory books are yours.
The assistant is only reachable if you open it, and it is given a short summary of your figures — never the whole database.
Remove cloud data from inside the app, or ask us — the process is on the delete page.
Read the detail in the privacy policy.
Download
The desktop builds are the whole app — billing, GST, stock, the khata, reports, printing and same-WiFi sync between counters. No account, and no internet needed after the download.
shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/HisabNova-1.2.0-macos.dmg
The trial is not a cut-down tier — a shopkeeper should meet the whole product in their first month. If the subscription later lapses, the books stay readable and exportable; you simply cannot add to them until you renew.
A single counter that bills, tracks stock and keeps a khata.
A shop that shares bills, buys stock and wants the full report suite.
More than one location, more than one person, and e-invoicing.
Prices in Indian rupees, billed monthly. Payments are handled by Razorpay; the app never names its own price — the server does, from its own table.
You can raise a legal bill before you have entered a single product — add the catalogue as you go. Here is the shortest honest path.
No sign-up, no OTP. The app opens straight into a working till.
Shop name, address, state and GSTIN. The state code is what decides CGST/SGST versus IGST later.
One of twenty categories. This is what turns batch tracking, weighed items or kitchen orders on.
Eleven to pick from, changeable any time from More → Language.
+ → New sale. Search or scan an item, pick how it is being paid, Save.
Print it, or send the PDF to the customer's WhatsApp. The sale is already recorded either way.
Setup, billing, khata, GST filing, team sync, backups, desktop shortcuts and troubleshooting — in one page.
Yes — billing, stock, khata, reports, PDFs and printing all run in aeroplane mode. Records are written to a database on your own device and are complete the moment you tap Save. Syncing to another device or to the cloud is something that happens afterwards, if you have set it up.
No. Billing, stock and khata all work without one. Add your GSTIN later in the business profile and it appears on documents from that point on — nothing already recorded is disturbed. The GSTIN is also what the app reads the state code from, and the state code is what decides CGST/SGST versus IGST.
Your books stay on your device, readable and exportable. An expired subscription stops you adding to them; it never takes them away, and backup, restore, CSV and Excel export are not gated on any plan.
Yes. One device runs as the hub and the others pair with it over the shop's Wi-Fi. Each device bills on its own invoice series — INV/… on the hub, INV-B/…, INV-C/… on the others — which GST permits provided each series is consecutive and unique. That is what lets two tills bill offline at once without ever minting the same number.
Nothing merges itself. The record is flagged, both versions are shown side by side under More → Records needing review, and an owner or admin picks which survives. Every choice writes an audit entry naming who made it.
Yes, and deliberately so. No floating-point number goes near a rupee — amounts are exact base-10 decimals stored as text. Division is the only operation that can lose precision, so it refuses to run without being told a scale and a rounding mode. Split amounts are allocated by largest-remainder so the parts sum back to the whole exactly.
Yes. Quantity carries its own unit and decimals — 2.5 kg of rice, 1.75 m of wire, 250 g of sweets — through pricing, stock and the printed bill. For unlabelled loose stock the app can also mint a real in-store barcode so it scans at the till.
It prepares the return, not the filing. GSTR-1 gives you B2B/B2C splits, rate-wise taxable and tax, and an HSN summary, exportable as CSV; there is a GSTR-3B summary view; and e-invoice and e-way bill payloads are generated in the schema the portal expects. The upload itself still happens on the government portal.
No. The assistant is only reachable when you open it, and it is handed a short live summary — sales, dues, health, top items — not the database. It is instructed never to invent your figures, only to reason from what it is given. If you never open it, nothing is ever sent.
Wi-Fi sync is not. Several devices holding copies is resilience, not retention, and GST records must survive six years. Use scheduled exports or cloud backup alongside it — the guide has a page on what to do weekly.
Yes — macOS and Windows builds run the same books, with a sidebar instead of a bottom bar, keyboard shortcuts, USB barcode-gun support and one-press printing to the counter's printer. Bill scanning (OCR) is the one feature with no desktop implementation.
The complete guide covers setup through troubleshooting. For anything it doesn't answer, the support page has the contact details and what to include so we can actually help.