Billing for your medical store in Goa
A strip, half a strip and a single tablet on one bill, and a pensioner's monthly medicines on one page.
Tools for a counter that sells by the strip, the tablet and the month
Bills on your phone
The visitor's few days of holiday medicines on one bill: the substitute brand, the cream and the salts, each named strip by strip and sent to her phone.
GST bills
Sunburn cream, salts and a stomach strip, each with its tax, add to one total the visitor can show the family back home.
Credit book (khata)
A page for each house on the scooter boy's round, so the bags are packed house by house and nothing goes to the wrong door.
Low stock warnings
A warning on the sunburn cream and the rehydration salts through the holiday weeks, so the call to the distributor is made before the last go.
Why a Goa chemist sends a visitor home with no bill, leaves a far-off daughter's question unanswered and serves the four o'clock queue from memory
A visitor with sunburn and a stomach upset, three days into a holiday, who wants a bill to send home
A visitor asks for tablets by the brand he takes at home. The chemist offers another that does the same work, he agrees, and he wants a bill he can keep. The pad copy is a scribble with a total, so he leaves with nothing in his hand and no way to show his family what he bought. The shop has no record of the visitor's medicine either, if he comes back next day and says it did not help.
An old couple in a village house, and a daughter far away who asks what the medicines cost
An old couple lives alone in a village house, and their medicines go to them with the boy on a scooter. The chemist writes the amount on a slip and the old woman signs it. When a daughter who lives far away rings to ask what the medicines came to this month, the answer is a search through a bundle of slips.
The shutter goes up at four, and the queue outside has been waiting since the doctor's morning
The chemist shuts for the afternoon. The shutter goes up at four and the people who saw the doctor in the morning are already outside with their prescriptions. The first ones are served from the head and the pad. By six the owner cannot say what left the shelf in those two hours, and the evening's call to the distributor is made from a look at the shelf.
.jpg){kind=link}
From a prescription read aloud to a bill that reaches the daughter's phone
The prescription's six lines made into one bill and sent back to the phone it came from
Set each medicine as an item with the strip's rate and the single tablet's rate. Make the bill line by line from the prescription, with the GST worked out, and send it to the customer on WhatsApp. She has the list of what she was sold, and the shop has the same list. The strength is part of the item's name, so the line on the bill is the line on the box.
The old couple's month of medicines read from one page before the boy loads the scooter
Give the old couple's house a page. Every delivery the boy makes is a bill under it, so by the month's end the page lists each strip that went to the house. Before he loads the scooter for the next round, you read last month's page and put the same strips together, and the house is not left a day without.
The shelf read at five o'clock on the third rainy day
When the rains settle in and the fever shelf thins, the low-stock warning shows which items are running out and the daily report shows how fast. At five you read both, make your order to the distributor for what you actually need, and note what arrives next morning.
What a Goa medical store owner asks before starting
A visitor says she may come back tomorrow if the tablets do not help. How will I know what I gave her?
Send the bill to her WhatsApp as you make it, with the brand you gave named on it. If she comes back, she shows the bill and you see the brand and the day, and the day's sales hold the same line.
The old woman signs a slip when the boy delivers, and he brings it back. Where does the slip go?
The slip is paper and stays in your own file, filed by its day. The page holds the bill with the same day, so the day tells you which slip belongs to which bill.
The fever shelf thins by evening in the rains. What do I look at first?
Open the low-stock warnings and then the day's sales. The warnings name what is nearly gone, and the sales show what went fastest, so the first call to the distributor is for those.
Dengue after the rains, and a one-day strike by chemists
Dengue cases rise in Goa after the monsoon sets in: the Hospicio South Goa hospital lab found 39 positives in June 2026, 91 in July and 71 in ten days of August. A shop that sees more people asking for fever medicines can read the rise in the daily report as it happens.
About 600 private standalone medical stores in Goa shut for a 24-hour strike in May 2026 over online medicine sales, coordinated by the Chemists and Druggists Association of Goa. A shop that takes orders from its own online shop keeps those orders in the same account as the counter's bills.