This is about record-keeping, not about tax. What a shop owes and which scheme it falls under are questions for whoever prepares your returns, and the answers change. What does not change is that the person preparing them has to be able to read your sales — and most of the pain at the end of a period comes from that rather than from the rules.
The difference between a receipt and a record
A receipt tells a customer what they paid. A record tells you, months later, what was sold, at what price, under what treatment, by whom, and against which stock. A shop can print a perfectly good receipt and still have nothing to hand an accountant.
The test is simple. Pick a day six months ago and try to reproduce its totals from what you kept. If that takes more than a minute, the record is doing less work than it should be.
Store the treatment on the line, not in your head
Different lines can be treated differently, and which is which is not something to remember at the end of a quarter. The moment a sale is rung up, each line should carry its own treatment and its own amount, and the sale should carry the total that resulted.
The reason is not neatness. If the totals are computed later by applying a rate across everything, then changing that rate — or discovering a line was categorised wrongly — silently rewrites history. If the amount is stored with the sale, what you charged stays what you charged, and a correction is visible as a correction.
One numbering series, locked
Document numbers are the first thing an outside reader checks, because gaps and duplicates are easy to spot and hard to explain. Two counters issuing numbers independently will collide eventually, and a series that restarts when somebody reinstalls something is worse still.
Allocate the number from one place, at the moment the document is issued, and never reuse it. If a document is cancelled the number stays used, and the cancellation is recorded against it.
Cancel by reversing, never by deleting
A deleted sale is a hole. A reversed one is a pair of entries that say what happened and why, and it is the version that survives being asked about. The same applies to a return: it is its own document pointing at the original, not an edit of the original.
This is the single habit that turns a pile of sales into something an accountant can work from without asking you to remember anything.
What to be able to produce, per period
- Total sales, split by how each line was treated.
- The same figures per branch, if you have more than one.
- A list of documents issued, with no gaps in the series, and the cancelled ones shown as cancelled.
- Purchases with their supplier documents attached, over the same period.
- Day-by-day totals, so a question about one date does not mean reconstructing a month.
If those five come out of your records in a few minutes, the end of a period is an afternoon. If any one of them has to be assembled by hand, it is a week — and it is a week that recurs.
A note on business days
A pharmacy that closes at eleven at night is still trading on the same business day at five past. Group your figures by the business day you actually keep rather than by midnight, or every late evening drifts into tomorrow and the daily totals stop matching the drawer.
Where software comes in
None of the above needs a computer. All of it is easier with one, and the part a computer genuinely does better is never forgetting: the number series, the treatment on the line, the reversal that keeps the trail readable.
Farmasale stores every sale with its treatment and its batch, allocates document numbers from one locked series, and reverses rather than deletes. Seven days free, no card, and your existing records come across with you.