Batch numbers for pharma, lots and job work for textiles, retention for contractors, kanta slips for the mandi. The system underneath is one ledger; what changes is which part of it you spend your day in.
Distribution is a margin business run on somebody else’s money.
Retail software is judged on two things: how fast the queue moves, and whether the till agrees with the books at closing time.
Most small manufacturers know their selling price exactly and their cost approximately.
In pharma the batch is the unit that matters, not the item.
Textiles breaks generic inventory software in two specific ways: stock is tracked by lot because two lots of the same quality are not interchangeable, and half the value-add happens at somebody else’s premises.
Steel is sold by weight at a rate that changes between the quotation and the lorry, cut to lengths that leave an offcut, and delivered at a freight cost that eats the margin nobody calculated.
An FMCG distributor’s day happens in a van.
A contractor’s profit and loss for April tells you almost nothing.
A transporter’s margin is decided per trip — diesel, tolls, driver advance, return load — and it is settled days after the lorry gets back.
A services business has no inventory and a completely different set of problems: work billed before it is done, work done before it is billed, and a TDS deduction on almost every receipt that has to be tracked until the credit appears.
Every restaurant knows its sales.
In electronics the individual unit matters.
A spares counter runs on one question asked forty times a day: do you have the part for this vehicle.
Agri trading has costs generic software has never heard of: bardana, hamali, mandi fees, commission, and a weight that shrinks between purchase and sale because the grain dried out.
Start free and set it up the way your industry actually works.