The Complete Guide

1Installing & first run

HisabNova ships to four platforms from one codebase. Whichever you install, the books, the GST engine and the invoice PDFs are identical — only the hardware around them differs.

What happens the first time you open it

Nothing asks you to sign up. There is no OTP, no email and no waiting screen — the app creates a local database on the device and drops you into a working till. The onboarding sheet that appears is four short questions, and you can dismiss it and come back later from More › Business profile

Do I need an account?

Only for cloud backup. Signing in with Google or an email address turns on off-site sync; skipping it changes nothing about how the app works. If you later want cloud backup without giving an email, there is a guest sign-in that can be upgraded to a real account afterwards.

2Setting up your shop

Five minutes here decides what the rest of the app looks like. Three of these five answers change real behaviour, not just wording.

1 · Business profile

• Shop name and address — printed at the top of every document, and used as the transaction note when a customer pays you by UPI.
• State — this is the important one. The state code is compared against the customer's place of supply to decide whether a bill carries CGST + SGST or a single IGST. Get it wrong and every inter-state bill is taxed incorrectly.
• GSTIN — optional. Without it you can still bill, hold stock and run a khata; add it later and it appears on documents from that point on, with nothing already recorded disturbed.
• Phone, email, UPI ID — the UPI ID is what the payment QR on your bills points at.
• Financial year and invoice prefix — controls numbering, e.g. INV/2026-27/0001.

2 · Pick your trade

Twenty categories, and the choice switches real features on and off. The rule is hide what cannot apply, never hide what is unlikely — so a restaurant loses IMEI capture (it can never have one) but a bookshop keeps weighed items (it might).

3 · Choose a language

Eleven languages, each listed in its own script first: English, हिन्दी, বাংলা, मराठी, తెలుగు, தமிழ், ગુજરાતી, اُردُو, ಕನ್ನಡ, ଓଡ଼ିଆ, മലയാളം. Urdu runs right to left and the whole layout follows. Change it whenever you like — it is a display setting, not a data one.

4 · Lock the app

Set a PIN, and turn on biometric unlock if the device has it — fingerprint on Android, Face or Touch ID on iPhone and Mac, Windows Hello on a PC. Set the owner PIN too: it is a second gate on the six actions that can rewrite money (see §11), and it is what keeps a tablet left on the counter from being used to cancel bills.

5 · Try it with demo data first (optional)

Loads a fictional shop — products, customers, bills, a khata with real balances — so you can explore every screen with something in it. Clear it in one tap before you start billing for real.

3Your first bill

This is the screen you will spend your working life in, so it is worth ten minutes now.

1. Open it Tap the green ＋ and choose New sale. On a desktop it is Ctrl/⌘ N.
2. Say who it's for — or don't Pick a saved customer, add a new one, or leave it blank for a walk-in. A named customer unlocks the khata; a walk-in still gets every payment option.
3. Put the items on Three ways, and they mix freely on one bill:
   • Search — type two or three letters of the name.
   • Scan — the camera on a phone, or just pull the trigger on a USB gun at a desktop counter; no button, nothing to focus first.
   • Speak — tap the mic and dictate. What the app heard is shown for you to confirm before anything is added.
4. Fix the quantity Whole numbers for pieces; decimals for weighed goods — 2.5 kg, 1.75 m, 250 g. The unit rides along with the number all the way to the printed bill.
5. Discount, if any Per line, or one discount on the whole bill. A bill-level discount is spread across the lines in proportion to their taxable value, which is what the GST documented-discount rule requires — see the figure below.
6. Check the totals Taxable value, then CGST and SGST (or IGST), then the round-off, then the total. Every figure is computed from the lines, never typed.
7. Say how it is being paid Cash, Credit, or Split. See §5.
8. Save The bill, its lines, its stock movements and its ledger postings are written in one transaction. If the device dies half a second later, either all of it is there or none of it is — never half.
9. Hand it over Print it, or share the PDF to WhatsApp. Either way the sale is already recorded; sharing is a separate act, not part of saving.

Inclusive (MRP) pricing

If a product is priced at MRP — tax already inside the number — mark it inclusive and the app pulls the taxable value back out with taxable = inclusive × 100 ÷ (100 + rate + cess). It does not approximate by subtracting a percentage, which is a different and wrong number.

Editing and cancelling

• A draft can be changed freely until it is saved.
• A saved bill can be edited if your role allows it, and the change is versioned rather than overwritten.
• Cancelling a bill asks for the owner PIN, even from an owner. It reverses the stock and the ledger rather than erasing the record — the number stays used, because a missing invoice number in a series is exactly what an audit asks about.

4The five document types

All five use the same calculation engine and the same storage. They differ in their numbering series, what they do to stock, and whether they count as revenue.

5Getting paid

Every bill is settled one of three ways, chosen on the billing screen before you save.

The app enforces one rule everywhere: collected + balance = total, and the collected amount can never be negative or more than the total. A "split" of the whole bill is stored as cash, and a split of nothing is stored as credit — otherwise a bill would print "Cash + Credit" with nothing actually collected against it.

Walk-ins can be given credit too

A counter customer paying ₹600 of a ₹1,000 bill is an ordinary transaction, so the app records it. What it cannot do is chase it: there is no khata for an unnamed customer, so the balance sits on the bill and not in anyone's outstanding. The payment sheet says exactly that, once, rather than taking the option away:

Collecting by UPI

1. Set your UPI ID once More › Business profile
2. Pick UPI as the instrument on the bill A UPI Pay button appears beside Save & Continue.
3. Show the QR The amount is what is being collected now, never the total — asking a customer paying half to transfer the whole bill would be worse than not offering the button at all.
4. Save the bill This is the step that records the money.

The transaction note carries your shop's name, because that is the string that lands in the customer's bank statement and UPI history — an invoice number they have not been handed yet helps nobody. UPI collection is offered on a tax invoice only: a quotation is a price, and a delivery challan is not a demand for payment.

Recording a payment later

Money received against one bill, against several, or on account with no bill named. Money paid out to a supplier works the same way. Receipts show on the customer statement under the bill they settle, and money on account is listed separately so it is never mistaken for a paid bill.

Credit limits

Set a credit limit per customer. Going over it warns rather than blocks — an owner at their own counter may have every reason to extend a regular a little more, and a hard refusal would only push them to bill it as cash and lose the record entirely.

6Products & stock

You can bill without a catalogue, but a catalogue is what makes the bill fast, the tax right and the stock figure real.

Adding a product

Barcodes: one is generated, the other is not

The form offers a one-tap fill for both the barcode and the HSN. They look like the same feature and are deliberately opposite.

Selling by weight or measure

Set the unit to kg, g, L, ml or m and the quantity field accepts decimals. 2.5 kg of rice at ₹92 is billed as ₹230.00 — not rounded up to 3 kg, and not stored as a float that drifts. The unit prints on the bill, so the customer can check the arithmetic.

For unlabelled loose stock, mint an in-store barcode (above) and stick it on the packet; it then scans like anything else.

Batches & expiry

Available to pharmacy, FMCG distribution, cosmetics, bakery and dairy. Each inward lot carries a batch number and an expiry date, and a sale consumes stock under one of three strategies:

• FEFO — first expiring, first out. The right default for anything that goes off.
• FIFO — first in, first out. For goods that do not expire but do age.
• Manual — you pick the batch, for when the customer asked for a specific one.

If there is not enough stock across batches, the app reports the shortfall rather than silently going negative — and lets you override deliberately if you sell it anyway.

Lists what is expiring and when, so slow stock gets moved before it becomes a write-off.

Why the stock figure can be trusted

Stock is never a number somebody edits. Every change is an immutable movement with a signed quantity and a typed reason, and the balance is what those movements add up to. A "sale" that tried to add stock is rejected rather than recorded. That is why a crash mid-sale, or two devices syncing in an odd order, cannot leave you with a stock figure that is quietly wrong.

Adjusting stock

Damage, theft, expiry write-off, a stock-take correction — all of them are recorded as movements with a reason, not as an edit to a number. That means your stock history explains itself six months later.

Branches & godowns

Stock balances per location, with transfers between them recorded as movements like everything else. A Business-plan feature.

7Customers & khata

The khata is the part of a small shop's books that most often lives in someone's head. This is the part of the app worth being strict about.

Adding a customer

Name and phone are enough. Add a GSTIN if they are registered — that is what makes their bills B2B in your GSTR-1. Set a credit limit if you want a warning when they go past it.

What lands on the khata, and when

When you save a tax invoice for a named customer, three things happen inside the same transaction as the bill:

1. A debit for the grand total The whole bill goes on their account.
2. A receipt for anything collected Recorded as a real payment, not just a ledger line — because receivables ageing, the payments list and the statement all read the payments table.
3. A credit settling that receipt So the ledger and the money agree.

Reading a statement

Date ranges, and why the balance never resets

Two independent date fields — From and To — either of which can be left open. "What has this customer done since Diwali?" sets one end and leaves the other running.

The statement is always computed from the customer's whole history, then windowed. That is deliberate: the opening balance is precisely the part that falls outside your window, and a receipt recorded this month can settle a bill from last year. A window with no entries still carries the balance forward — a khata that reset to zero whenever you narrowed the dates would tell the customer they owe only this month's bills.

Sending it to the customer

Share the statement as a PDF, Excel or CSV, straight to WhatsApp. The screen, the PDF and the share are all built from the same computed statement, so the copy you read and the copy they receive cannot disagree.

Chasing what is owed

Ageing buckets — 0–30, 31–60, 60+ days — across every customer, so you can see what is genuinely old rather than merely unpaid. From a customer's screen, a one-tap WhatsApp reminder attaches their statement.

8Purchases, expenses & the cash book

Sales alone cannot tell you whether the shop made money. These three screens are what turn turnover into profit.

Purchases

Record a supplier's bill. Inward stock lands as movements, the supplier's account is credited with what you owe, and the purchase price feeds your margin. Pay it later from Record payment.

Scanning a supplier bill instead of typing it

Point the camera at the bill and on-device text recognition reads it into a draft. Two things worth knowing:

• The image never leaves the phone. Recognition runs on the device, not on a server.
• You confirm before it saves. Machine output is always shown for checking first — the same rule as voice input. OCR misreads a smudged 8 as a 3 often enough that a silent save would be a liability.

Not available on macOS or Windows — the text-recognition library has no desktop implementation, so the menu row is hidden there rather than left to fail.

Expenses

Rent, electricity, transport, wages, packing — categorised and dated, and netted against sales in the profit-and-loss report. Recurring expenses can be entered once a month in a few taps.

Cash & bank

Accounts with running balances. Every receipt and payment names the account it moved through, so the balance on screen is the balance you should find in the drawer.

9Reports & the health score

The dashboard answers "how is today going". The reports answer "how is the shop doing".

What the dashboard shows

• Today's sales, and how that compares with yesterday.
• Collected versus on khata — the difference between turnover and money.
• Business health, out of 100, with the four figures behind it.
• Needs attention — low stock, expiring batches, overdue khata.

The health score

One number built from margin, receivable days, stock cover and expiry exposure. The four inputs are shown alongside it, because a score with no working shown is a horoscope.

Reports

• Sales by day, month, item, customer and category
• Profit & loss
• Receivables ageing
• Stock valuation and slow-moving stock
• Expiry

Every report exports as PDF, Excel or CSV. On a phone that goes to the share sheet; on a desktop it opens a Save dialog, because the owner of a counter PC wants the file in the folder their accountant collects from.

Charts

Trends over time, category mix, top items and top customers — the same figures as the reports, drawn.

Benchmarks & coaching

10GST returns & e-invoice

HisabNova prepares your return. It does not file it — the upload still happens on the government portal, and nothing in the app pretends otherwise.

GSTR-1

Pick a period — this month, last month, this financial year, or all time (the financial year runs 1 April to 31 March). You get:

• B2B — sales to customers with a GSTIN, invoice by invoice.
• B2C — sales to unregistered customers, summarised.
• Rate-wise taxable value, CGST, SGST, IGST and cess.
• HSN summary — value and tax per code.
• Document series — the numbers issued, so gaps are visible.

Export writes CSVs your accountant can work from. On a desktop it asks once for a folder and writes all three files into it.

GSTR-3B

A summary view of outward supplies and tax payable, laid out the way the form asks for them, reconciled against the same invoice rows that printed the bills. It is a view of your own data, not a filing.

e-Invoice (IRN) & e-way bill

Generates the JSON payload in the schema the portal expects, with validation done here rather than after an upload is rejected. Upload it on the portal and bring the IRN and signed QR back to the bill.

A Business-plan feature, since e-invoicing applies above a turnover threshold most small shops sit below.

The numbers you file are the numbers you billed

Nothing in the return pipeline recomputes tax. The return reads the figures stored on each invoice at the moment it was saved. That is why a rate change next year cannot retroactively alter a return you have already filed.

11Working as a team

A second till usually arrives before a broadband line does. This section covers roles, staff sign-in, Wi-Fi sync and what happens when two devices disagree.

Roles

Nine roles: owner, admin, manager, accountant, cashier, salesperson, inventory manager, delivery staff, viewer. Sixteen permissions between them. The matrix that guards the writes is the same one that decides what a screen shows, so nobody is offered a figure the app will then refuse them.

Setting up the shop's Wi-Fi sync

1. Pick a hub Usually the counter device that is always on. More › Team sync › Run as hub
2. Generate a pairing code on the hub A single-use 6-digit code, valid for five minutes.
3. Enter it on the second device Same Wi-Fi network. Pairing refuses a device that belongs to a different business, so two shops' books can never be stitched together.
4. Let the first sync finish A newly paired device pulls the whole catalogue, customers and prices — not just a delta — so it starts from the shop's real book.
5. Leave auto-sync on It reconciles every five minutes and again whenever the app comes back to the front, which is exactly when you want fresh figures.

Why each device gets a letter

Invoice numbering is a device-local counter, so two devices billing offline would mint the same number. The hub keeps your plain series (INV/2026-27/0001) and each paired device is allocated a letter at pairing time — INV-B/2026-27/0001, INV-C/…, and so on. GST permits multiple series provided each is consecutive and unique, and unlike a shared counter this needs no connectivity at all.

Signing in as a staff member

On a shared tablet, the sign-in screen has two numbered steps and the second does not exist until the first is done:

1. Connect to the hub A freshly installed tablet holds no team members at all — the team list arrives by replication. Typing a phone number before pairing would be told "no such number", which is both true and useless.
2. Enter phone number and PIN Not a name picked off a list: a list would tell anyone holding the tablet who works there. The number is matched on its last ten digits, so +91 98765-43210 and 9876543210 are one person.

Removing someone

Deactivate them on your own phone. The next time the devices meet on the shop Wi-Fi, their tablet replaces the whole app with a notice — not four dead tabs inviting them to hunt for one that still works.

When two devices disagree

Nothing merges itself. If the same record was changed in two places, it is flagged and queued for a human.

Every choice writes an audit entry naming who made it, and resolving requires the settings permission — a cashier can see that something needs attention, but only an owner or admin decides which copy of a financial record survives.

What Wi-Fi sync does not do

• It is not a background service. iOS cannot hold a listening socket in the background, and Android battery managers kill foreground services unpredictably. Sync happens while the app is open. Because every device keeps a complete local database, this costs freshness and never costs you a bill.
• It is not a backup. Several devices holding copies is resilience, not retention — see §12.
• The traffic is signed but not yet encrypted. Every request carries a verified signature, so nothing on your network can forge or alter a record — but a co-located attacker on your Wi-Fi could read records in transit. Use a private, properly-passworded shop network, not a shared or open one.

12Backup & restore

This is the most important page in the guide. GST records must survive six years; a phone rarely does.

A weekly routine that works

1. Local backup, every week More › Backup Writes a single file containing the whole database.
2. Move it off the device Share it to Drive, email it to yourself, or on a desktop save it to a folder that is itself backed up. A backup that lives only on the phone it came from protects you against nothing.
3. Export CSVs monthly More › Import & export Send them to your accountant. A CSV is readable in thirty years; an app file needs the app.
4. Turn on cloud backup if you can More › Cloud sync Off-site, automatic, and the only one of these that does not depend on you remembering.

Restoring

Pick a backup file and the app rebuilds the database from it. Use this on a new device, or after a reinstall.

What each method covers

Importing

Bring a product catalogue or a customer list in from CSV or Excel. Download the template first — it names the columns the importer expects — and import a handful of rows before you import two thousand.

13Making it yours

The bill is the thing your customer keeps. It is worth ten minutes making it look like your shop.

Invoice designs

Twenty designs, from a ruled A4 tax invoice to an 80mm thermal roll. The gallery draws each one as a miniature in your own colour and typeface rather than listing twenty names, and Preview renders the real PDF.

Three things are separate on purpose:

• Layout — paper size, header arrangement, how the table is ruled, where the totals sit.
• Look — accent colour, ink, typeface, type size, spacing, corners.
• Content — which optional blocks print (terms, notes, signature, UPI QR, per-item tax columns) and their wording.

Your appearance choices are stored as overrides, not as a fixed look. Pin your brand colour and it follows you across all twenty designs, while the typeface you never touched still follows whatever each design intends. "Auto" on any control simply means "whatever this design wants".

Your logo and stamp

Add a shop logo and a signature or stamp image, from the camera or the gallery. They are cropped and compressed on the device.

Printing bills

Visiting cards & wall calendars

Two things a shop hands to a customer rather than files with an accountant. Both are reached from the buttons under your shop name in the business drawer, and both end at the share sheet — the point is a PDF you send to your local press or straight to a customer on WhatsApp.

• Visiting cards — eight designs, on the 89 × 51 mm standard card or the squarer 85 × 55 mm Euro card. Choose a card-sized page (for WhatsApp, where an A4 sheet would show the card as a stamp) or ten-up on A4 with crop marks (for the press, where a card-sized page is useless). Printing a reverse lays the backs out mirrored so they line up after a duplex flip.
• Calendars — one sheet, two half-years or twelve pages, with your shop name, offer line and UPI QR in the masthead and Indian holidays marked. The month grid is kept deliberately plain and the artwork is capped in strength: a date nobody can read from across a room is a failed calendar.

14On a Windows or Mac counter

The same books, with a sidebar instead of a bottom bar — and three things a phone cannot do.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts are checked against your role at the moment you press them — a cashier's ⇧ ⌘ N does nothing, rather than opening a screen that will refuse to save.

A USB barcode gun

A USB scanner is not a scanner as far as the operating system is concerned — it is a keyboard that types very fast and presses Enter. HisabNova listens for that directly: while the billing screen is open, pulling the trigger adds the item, with no button pressed and nothing focused first.

It tells a scan from typing by speed. Guns run 5–20 ms per character; a fast typist runs 120–200 ms. The threshold sits in the empty space between, and it errs towards missing a scan rather than inventing one — a missed scan costs one more trigger pull, a false one puts the wrong item on a customer's bill.

While a text field has focus the gun is left alone, so scanning into the catalogue search box searches for the code, which is what you meant. The Counter hardware screen shows each code as it arrives, which is the quickest way to check a new gun.

This works on macOS as well as Windows — a Mac counter with a gun plugged in is as common as a PC one, and having a camera does not make the gun stop existing.

One-press printing

A counter has one printer, and pressing Print should print. Choose the printer and the paper size once under Counter hardware; the choice is remembered per device, because two counters in the same shop share the books and each has its own printer. The invoice screen then gets a Print button beside Share, and the tooltip names the printer so you know where the paper will come out before you press it.

If no printer is set, or the chosen one has been unplugged, it falls back to the system print dialog. A shop must never be unable to print because a setting points at a queue that no longer exists.

Exports go to a folder

On a desktop every export — backup, CSV, GSTR-1, e-invoice, report PDF or Excel — opens a Save dialog instead of a share sheet, so the file lands in the folder your accountant collects from. GSTR-1 writes three CSVs and asks once for a folder.

What the desktop cannot do

• Bill scanning (OCR) — no desktop implementation exists, so the menu row is hidden rather than left to fail.
• Push notifications on Windows — scheduled local reminders still work.
• Cloud sign-in on desktop needs the cloud project to be configured for that platform; the app tells you plainly if it is not.

15AI assistant & business doctor

Two screens, both optional, both bounded in what they can see.

What they are

• AI Assistant — a chat you can ask about GST, pricing, cash flow, slow stock or receivables. It is grounded with a short live snapshot of your business so its answers are about your shop rather than shops in general.
• AI Business Doctor — a one-shot read of your figures with concrete suggestions, quoting the numbers it reasoned from.

What is sent, and when

What to trust it with

• Good for: "what does this GST term mean", "why is my margin falling", "which stock is not moving", "how should I price a bundle", "draft a WhatsApp reminder for an overdue customer".
• Not good for: anything you would file. It is an advisor, not your accountant, and a tax position it suggests is a starting point for a conversation with a professional — not a ruling.

These screens need a connection. If AI is unavailable the app says so plainly and everything else carries on working.

16Plans & billing

Thirty days free on the top plan, then three tiers. Five things are never gated at all.

Why the trial is the top plan

A trial that showed only the ₹49 surface would sell the ₹49 plan. You should meet the whole product in your first month and then choose what you actually want to keep.

What "read only" means

An expired subscription stops you adding to the books. It never takes them away: you can still open every bill, read every khata, run the core summary, and export or back up everything. Renewing puts you straight back where you were.

Paying

Payment runs through Razorpay in a browser page — in-app on a phone, the system browser on a desktop. The app never tells the server what a plan costs; it names a tier and the server prices it from its own table. That is a deliberate safeguard: a client that could name its own price could buy the top plan for a rupee and produce a perfectly valid payment signature for it.

Your entitlement follows the server's record, not the app's. If a payment succeeds but the plan has not appeared yet, give it a moment and reopen the subscription screen — the app polls for the result.

17Troubleshooting

The things that actually go wrong at a counter, and what to do about each.

18Quick reference

Where things live

Numbering series

Words you'll see

Still stuck?

The support page has the contact details and a short list of what to include so we can help on the first reply rather than the third.