Billing for your medical store in Karnataka
Strips, half strips and the monthly medicines of your oldest customers, billed and counted on your phone.
Tools for a counter that sells by the strip and by the tablet
Low stock warnings
A warning on the fever tablets or rehydration salts that are down to the last strips, before the rainy week starts.
Orders to suppliers
The distributor's order sent from your phone with the empty strips and low boxes listed together.
GST bills
A GST bill for a small clinic or a nursing home that buys its medicines from your shelf.
The generic box, the nursing home's weekly bill and the milk-money day
The branded box and the generic box, each with its own line
Keep the branded medicine and its cheaper generic as two items, each with its own rate and its own count. The bill shows exactly which one the customer took, and at the month's end the report says how many of each the shop sold. You see which one your own customers choose, and order that one first.
The clinic's weeks sit together on a page of its own
A small clinic or a nursing home takes tablets, syrups and bandages from your shelf every week. Put each week's bill on the clinic's own page, and the weeks stay together under its name. When the clinic's helper asks what last week came to, you open the page and read it out.
A tonic for the brown cow and another for the calf, kept apart on one bill
A farmer with several animals buys a different medicine for each. Put the animal in the item's name, such as tonic for the brown cow, and the bill says which animal each medicine was bought for. When he asks next month what you gave the brown cow, the bill answers, and you do not trust either memory.
What a Karnataka medical counter handles between the first strip and the last
A prescription read once at the counter and then gone
The doctor's prescription is read once by the pharmacist, the medicines are handed over, and the paper goes back into the customer's bag. A week later she comes back with a question about what she was given, and the only record is whatever the shop wrote down in a hurry. A helper who read the handwriting a little differently from the owner has made the same medicine two different lines in the book.
The branded medicine and its cheaper generic
A customer holds out a prescription for a branded medicine and asks whether there is a cheaper one with the same salt. The pharmacist knows the answer, but the two have different rates, different margins and different shelves. When the helper is at the counter, the customer is given whichever box is nearest, and the shop finds out only at the month's end that the wrong one was billed.
The farmer who buys for his cattle and pays when the milk money comes
In a farming town some of the customers buy for their cattle as well as for their families. They pay when the milk society pays them, and that day is not the day they came to the counter. The shop knows them and gives the medicine, and by the time the milk money comes the cattle medicine and the family's medicine have run together in one total.
The patients of Karnataka's districts, as a medical store meets them
A medical store treats whoever the district's work and weather bring in.
- Silk is mainly grown in Mysuru district, in a state that makes nearly 70% of India's mulberry silk, and Mysuru silk is sold through KSIC, so a store in the city also serves its silk workers.
- Ballari holds 25% of India's iron ore reserves, JSW's Vijayanagar steel works is at Toranagallu, and 75% of workers depend on farming, so the same store sees both the shift worker and the farmer.
- Belagavi has 24 sugar factories and 200 foundries producing over 70,000 tons of automotive and industrial castings, and a medical store near a foundry knows the workers by their shift.
- Dakshina Kannada is famous for red clay roof tiles (Mangalore tiles), cashew nuts and cashew products.
Questions Karnataka medical store owners ask
The cattle tonic is bought by the wife but the page is in her husband's name. Which name goes on the bill?
The page's name, the husband's, since that is the household's account. The bill is the household's, whoever comes for the tonic.
A customer wants the tablets she bought last month but forgot their name. Can I find them?
Yes. Open her earlier bills. Each one lists the medicines she took with the date, so you can read the name out and she can say yes.
In the dengue and chikungunya months, which medicines should I count every week?
Pick the few that run out first when fever spreads, such as fever tablets and oral rehydration salts, and read their count every Monday. Ask your distributor when the count is still half full, not when the shelf is bare.
Jan Aushadhi stores and a spring of dengue
With 1,052 Jan Aushadhi stores selling generic medicines at subsidised rates in November 2022, Karnataka was second only to Uttar Pradesh. A private medical store in the state works beside cheap generic counters, and its customers know the difference in rate.
Before the 2025 monsoon, Karnataka reported 956 dengue and 245 chikungunya cases by 4 April, and the health minister asked districts to actively monitor drug availability and shortages. A store that counts its own shelf already knows which medicines it is short of.