Best POS Software for a Kiryana Store or General Store in Pakistan

Ask a kiryana shopkeeper what his margin is and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask him to prove it from his records and the confidence goes.

That is not carelessness. A general store runs on a kind of arithmetic no register was built for: sugar sold by the pao, soap sold by the carton, half the regulars on udhaar, a freight bill that arrives a week after the goods, and two prices for the same tin depending on whether the buyer is a household or the shop down the road. Each of those is a small leak. Together they are the difference between the margin you think you have and the one in the drawer.

This is a guide to where that money actually goes, and what a POS has to do to stop it. It is written for a kiryana shop, a general store or a mini mart in Pakistan — not for a supermarket chain, and not as a feature list.

The five leaks

1. Loose goods, counted as if they were packets

You buy a 50 kg bag of sugar and sell it in paos and aadha kilos. By the time the bag is finished, the register says you sold a bag; it cannot say whether you sold 50 kg of sugar or 48.2 kg with the rest gone to generous scoops, spillage and the odd unrecorded sale.

The leak is not theft. It is that nobody can see it. A kilo of loss on a Rs 160 bag is small; the same loss on every bag, every week, is a salary.

What fixes it: loose stock held in kilos or litres to three decimal places, not in bags. Then a bag opened on Monday and finished on Friday reconciles to the gram, and a shortfall shows up as a number instead of a feeling.

2. Udhaar with no limit and no date

Credit is not optional in this trade and it is not the problem. The problem is credit with nothing attached to it: no limit, no agreed date, and no total.

Ask most shopkeepers what their customers owe them in total and you will get an estimate. The estimate is almost always low, because the register is organised by customer rather than by how long the money has been out. The man who has owed Rs 9,000 since Eid looks exactly like the man who bought atta on Tuesday.

What fixes it: a credit limit per customer that the till checks before the sale, a running total of all udhaar on one screen, and a list ordered by how old the debt is rather than by name. See khata software.

3. Freight and loading, left out of cost

This is the quietest of the five and the one that most reliably flatters your figures.

A delivery arrives with a bill for the goods. Freight and loading are paid separately — sometimes in cash, sometimes on a bill that turns up a week later. If those charges never reach the cost of the items, then every margin you calculate afterwards is overstated, on every line, for as long as that stock lasts.

What fixes it: landed cost — the charges spread across the items on that delivery by value or by quantity, including a freight bill that arrives after the purchase was already posted. There is more in landed cost for kiryana purchases.

4. One price where the shop really has two

Most general stores sell retail to households and at a trade rate to smaller shops nearby. Done on paper, that becomes a judgement call at the counter — and a cashier who is not the owner will either lose the sale or give away the margin.

What fixes it: both rate cards on the item, dated, so a price change never rewrites an old bill; a counter that can be set to retail or wholesale; quantity breaks that drop the rate from a set quantity; and below-cost selling that needs a manager. See retail and wholesale billing.

5. Expiry, discovered by a customer

A kiryana shop is not a pharmacy, but milk powder, baby food, sauces and biscuits all have dates — and the stock that expires is almost always the stock at the back.

What fixes it: expiry tracked per item where you want it, stock held in lots by date, the earliest date sold first, and a near-expiry report you can act on while the goods are still worth something. See expiry dates in a grocery store.

What this rules out

Those five leaks are a useful filter, because most of the software sold to Pakistani shops fails at least one of them.

The row that catches people is the third. A general POS will demo beautifully, because the demo sells packets. The questions that find its limits are the boring ones: sell me Rs 50 of sugar; add freight to that delivery; show me today's total udhaar.

Six questions for any demo

Ask these in this order, of whatever you are shown — ours included. Each one maps to a leak, and each takes under a minute to answer.

1. "Sell me Rs 50 of sugar." Not 300 grams — fifty rupees' worth. The till should work out the weight itself. If the salesman reaches for a calculator, your cashier will too, forty times a day.
2. "Open a 50 kg bag and sell four paos from it." The remaining stock should read in kilos with decimals, not "1 bag".
3. "Add Rs 2,000 freight to this delivery." Watch whether item costs change. Then ask what happens if the freight bill arrives next week.
4. "Show me the total udhaar, oldest first." One screen, one number, sorted by age. Not a list of customers.
5. "Give this customer a trade rate." Then ask whether yesterday's bills changed when the price did. They must not.
6. "Turn off the internet and keep billing." Then ask where the data lives while it is off, and what happens when it comes back.

A product that answers all six is worth its price. One that answers four is worth asking about the other two before you pay.

Where MartPOS fits

This is ours, so treat the rest as a worked example of the six answers rather than a recommendation. MartPOS is Windows point-of-sale software built for exactly this trade — kiryana shops, general stores, grocery shops and mini marts.

• Rs 50 of sugar: press F6, type the amount. At Rs 160 a kilo that bills 0.313 kg for Rs 50.08, and the rounding line takes it to Rs 50.
• The opened bag: loose stock is kept in kilos or litres to three decimals, with quick buttons for 100 g, 250 g, 500 g and 1 kg.
• Freight: spread across the items by value or by quantity, and a bill that arrives after the purchase is added to it later.
• Udhaar: limits checked at the till before the sale, the total to collect on one screen, and a bill left too long warns before more is added.
• Two prices: retail and wholesale on the item, dated, with history kept; per-counter setting; quantity breaks; below cost needs a manager.
• No internet: the shop's own PC runs the store server and owns the records, so billing, returns, purchases and closing the day all continue. On a Cloud plan the changes queue and go up in order when the line returns. See desktop or cloud.

Beyond the six: a double-entry day book (roznamcha), trial balance and cash book; a blind cash count at shift close that hides the expected figure until you have counted; receipts in English, Urdu or both with Urdu printed as a picture so the printer needs no font; FBR POS integration that stays switched off until a Tier-1 retailer needs it; and a free Android owner app, read-only, showing each branch's sales, profit, stock and khata.

What it costs

Two ways to buy, and the choice is mostly about whether you want the shop visible from your phone.

Add-ons where you need them: an extra counter or a five-login staff pack at Rs 19,999 each, Cloud Backup Only at Rs 4,990 a year per branch, and Care renewal at Rs 5,500 a year. There is a 14-day free trial from when you set up your first PC, no card required, and no setup fee.

Prices as of October 2026. Confirm the current figures before buying — ours included.

Getting started without losing a week

The fear that stops most shops is the item list. It is less work than it looks, because you enter positions rather than history.

1. Pick a quiet stretch. Not the week before Ramzan or Eid.
2. Import the item list. Items with their packs, Urdu names and opening stock, plus customers and suppliers with opening balances, come in from Excel or CSV. Every row is checked before anything is written, and the import resumes after a power cut.
3. Enter balances, not bills. What each customer owes today. The four months behind that figure are already settled into it.
4. Count your loose stock in kilos. This is the one step worth doing carefully — it is the baseline every later shortfall is measured against.
5. Run both for two weeks. Keep the register going while you bill on the PC, and compare the drawer every evening. When they agree for a fortnight, close the register. Covered in switching from a register to a POS.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best POS software for a kiryana store in Pakistan?

The one that closes the five leaks: loose goods tracked by weight rather than by bag, udhaar with limits and ageing, freight included in cost, retail and wholesale prices together, and expiry where it matters — while still billing with the internet off. Generic khata apps fix only the second, and general retail POS usually misses the first and third. Run the six demo questions above on anything you are shown.

Can it sell loose goods by rupees instead of by weight?

It should. A customer asking for "Rs 50 ka cheeni" is the normal case, not the exception, and making a cashier do that division forty times a day is how mistakes and queues happen. In MartPOS it is F6 and the amount: Rs 50 at Rs 160 a kilo bills 0.313 kg.

Do I need internet in the shop?

Not for billing. The shop's own PC should own the records, so selling, returns, purchases, khata payments and closing the day all carry on without a connection. Internet matters for syncing to the cloud and for seeing the shop from your phone. One thing to check in any demo: whether a till on a second PC still works when the network is down.

How much should a kiryana shop expect to pay?

Expect either a one-time licence in the tens of thousands or a yearly plan in the same range. MartPOS is Rs 29,900 once for a one-branch desktop licence, or Rs 19,900 a year on cloud. What matters more than the headline is what it costs over three years and what the add-ons cost — count extra counters and staff logins before you compare.

Will it print Urdu?

Ask specifically, because many thermal printers have no Urdu font. The reliable approach is for the software to send Urdu as an image rather than as text, which MartPOS does; you then choose English, Urdu or both for the wording and for item names separately.

What about FBR?

Only Tier-1 retailers are required to report, and the criteria change with each budget — check your status on IRIS or with your tax adviser. What matters in software is that reporting stays entirely switched off until you need it, with no FBR fields and no fee, and that when it is on, bills made while FBR is unreachable are sent automatically once it is back.

Can two counters share one stock?

Yes, over the shop network, with one PC owning the database so two tills can never both sell the last packet. That is also why a second counter needs that PC reachable. Extra counters are usually a paid add-on, so count them before comparing prices.

Is there a free trial?

MartPOS gives 14 days from when you set up your first PC, with no card. Use it on your own item list rather than the demo data — importing fifty real items and your actual udhaar balances tells you far more in an afternoon than a sales call does.

In short

A kiryana shop does not lose money in one big way. It loses it in grams of sugar, in udhaar nobody totalled, in freight that never reached the cost, in a trade rate given away at the counter, and in a carton of milk powder found too late.

Software earns its price by closing those five, and you can tell in ten minutes whether it does. Ask for Rs 50 of sugar, add freight to a delivery, and ask for today's total udhaar oldest first. The answers will tell you more than any feature list.

If you want to run those tests on ours, the 14-day trial is the whole software with nothing switched off. Questions, or want a walkthrough on a call? Talk to us — we are in Jhang, on WhatsApp and the phone — or read more about MartPOS.