Founder & CEO, Innobrains Technologies
Arshad Ali is the founder and CEO of Innobrains Technologies, the company that is building BooksPOS: point-of-sale, stock and khata software for book depots and stationers in Pakistan.
Pencils come in boxes of 12, markers in boxes of 10, paper in reams of 500, and customers buy all of them loose too. How to set pack sizes per item so stock stays exact whichever way you sell.
The weeks before schools open decide a book depot's year. A practical checklist for the month before, the rush itself and the weeks after, and where BooksPOS helps at each step.
Keep each school's class list, put the whole set on the bill with one key, leave out what the parent already has, and order what is out of stock for them. A walk-through of school course sets in BooksPOS.
A box of books going back to a publisher is money you are owed until their credit note arrives. How BooksPOS records a publisher return as a claim, settles it with the credit note, and handles a shortfall.
When a school changes the edition of a reader, the old and new copies are different stock at different prices. How BooksPOS keeps each edition as its own item, from import to the till to publisher returns.
The last character of every ISBN is worked out from the others. Here is how the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 check digits are calculated, how the two forms convert, and why BooksPOS refuses a wrong ISBN instead of guessing.
Record money a parent pays ahead as an advance (not a sale), use it later with the "From advance" tender, and refund what is left, with the drawer and khata staying right.
Bring in products with opening stock, customers with what they owe and suppliers with what you owe them, from a CSV file, with every row checked before anything is saved.
Let a second computer bill against the same stock: switch on the store PC's shop-network listener, create a one-time code, and connect the new till. Plus how to remove one.