Almost every pharmacy sells on credit, and almost none of them decided to. It starts with the doctor next door and the family three houses down, and within a year a fifth of the month is written in a notebook only one person can read.
The money is not usually lost because customers refuse to pay. It is lost because nobody can say, on a Tuesday afternoon, exactly who owes what.
The notebook problem
A paper baki khata has three failures and they compound. Only the owner can read it, so the counter cannot answer a customer without fetching him. It records what was given but rarely what came back, so balances drift upward and then get argued about. And it has no memory of when — a balance with no dates on it cannot be chased, because nobody can tell a three-week-old debt from a three-year-old one.
What a ledger has to record
- Every credit sale as it happens, with the sale attached, so a customer can be shown what the balance is made of rather than told a number.
- Every payment against it, with the date and who took it. A payment recorded as a subtraction with no date is how the same two thousand taka gets counted twice.
- The age of the balance, not only its size. Thirty, sixty and ninety days are three different conversations, and the third one is different again.
- A limit, set per customer and visible at the counter before the sale rather than discovered after it.
Setting limits without losing the customer
A limit is not a punishment. It is what lets your staff say no without making it personal. Set it from what somebody actually buys in a month rather than from how you feel about them, tell them what it is, and let the screen enforce it.
The conversation then stops being "we do not trust you" and becomes "the system will not let me past this until something comes off the balance", which is both true and far easier to say to a neighbour.
Collecting without a collections process
A small shop does not need a dunning cycle. It needs three habits.
Say the balance out loud at every visit. Not as a demand — just "that takes it to about four thousand". Most people settle up sooner simply because the number was mentioned, and nobody is ever surprised by it later.
Ask at the point of the next sale. The moment somebody is already spending money is the easiest moment to collect. A phone call two weeks later is the hardest.
Work the oldest first, once a month. Take the list, start at the top, and stop after half an hour. Old balances go bad by being ignored, not by being large.
Reading the ledger as a number, not a list
Two figures tell you whether credit is helping or quietly eating the shop. The first is the total outstanding against a normal month of sales: if it is creeping up as a share, you are lending more each month than you are collecting. The second is how much of it is older than sixty days, because that is the part that usually turns into a write-off.
Neither number has to be zero. Credit is a real service, and in many neighbourhoods it is the reason the customer comes to you rather than the shop on the main road. It just has to be a decision you are making rather than one that is happening to you.
Bringing an old notebook across
Do not type in years of history. Enter the current balance per customer as an opening figure, with the date you struck it, and start recording properly from that day. The notebook stays on the shelf for anybody who wants to argue about the past, and the ledger from today forward is the one that works.
Try it on your own khata
Farmasale posts a credit sale to the customer ledger as it is rung up, shows the balance and its age at the counter, and holds the limit you set. Seven days free, no card.