How to run a customer credit ledger

Customer credit is the biggest hole in a small shop’s cash. The goods leave, the money stays with the buyer, and the notebook entry ages month by month: who took what is forgotten, the due date passes, and all that is left is an argument. That is the point of keeping the credit ledger on your phone: every debt is stored with the customer, the amount and the date, payments land on top of it, and late payers stand out on their own.

Before you write the debt, look at the customer

Let the history decide whether to give credit, not your mood. At the till, typing the phone number brings up the customer’s name and current debt; the customer card holds every debt they have: amount, note, due date, how much is paid and the status (active, overdue, settled). The coloured dot next to the name is their payment habit — not an invented score, but a figure calculated from that customer’s real debt history.

• What the dot is built from: how many debts the customer closed on time, the average days late, and how many days late they are right now.
• More than 14 days late right now — red. If more than half of their closed debts were closed late (with at least two closed) — red again; if more than a fifth were late — yellow.
• When a debt is being written for a customer you should be careful with, a warning appears on screen. A seller you have given permission to see debts sees that warning too — an employee without it is shown neither the trust indicator nor any debt figures.
• You can set a boundary per customer: with a credit limit set, a debt above it will not be written, and a blocked customer gets no new debt at all. A limit of zero means no limit.

Credit at the till: the phone number first, the name second

When you pick “On credit” as the payment type, the phone number is asked first: if the customer is already in the base, their name and open debt appear at once; if they are new, only then does a name field show up. The sale goes straight into the credit ledger and is added to that customer’s balance. Such a sale cannot be finished without a number — both the app and the server block it.

The phone number is not just another field — it is the key that holds the whole ledger together:

• Every number is normalised to the same shape (+998 plus nine digits): forms written with a leading “8”, spaces or dashes are understood too.
• The same number cannot belong to two customers — you are told whose it is. That is why one person never appears twice in the ledger.
• Next time you do not hunt for the person by name: type the number and the debt is there.
• One thing to know: search in the customer list works by name, while search by number is there at the till, when you sell on credit.

They paid part of it — write down the rest

The most common case: the customer pays part of it and says “next week” about the rest. You type the amount actually handed over into the “how much the customer paid now” field — the remainder is calculated and goes to the debt. So on goods worth 500,000, with 100,000 paid, the ledger records 400,000. The server compares the two parts against the receipt total and refuses to save the sale if they do not match, so this kind of sale never breaks your cash count. One limit: if a discounted item is in the basket, a split payment is not saved for now.

Always set a due date — otherwise the debt goes invisible

The due date is the most useful column in the ledger. Overdue debts are marked automatically (the check runs once an hour) and appear on the home screen as their own list, together with a “due today” list. But here is the honest part: a credit sale made at the till carries no due date, because the till screen does not ask for one — and a debt without a date is never marked overdue and never enters the reminder list. A debt with a date is written from the “Add debt” screen or the customer card: name, phone, amount, due date and a note about what was taken. So if the date matters to you — and it usually does — write the credit there; just note that the item then does not leave stock by itself.

If you are in a hurry, a debt can be written as a single sentence in Uzbek: you type or say “Karim akaga 120 ming shanbagacha” (120 thousand to Karim aka by Saturday) — the name, amount and date are parsed out and shown for confirmation. The amount can be given as “2 million 300 ming”, the date as “5 kun” (5 days), “oy oxiri” (end of the month) or “shanba” (Saturday); a Russian phrase gives the name and amount, and the date is then picked in its field. Voice relies on your phone’s own speech recognition and the microphone stops after 12 seconds; if the device does not support it, you simply type. And check the amount before saving: a debt that is already written cannot have its amount or date edited and cannot be deleted — only payments are added on top.