Billing for your mobile shop in Meghalaya, on your phone
Bills, stock and UPI for every phone, charger and cover you sell.
Tools for phones, parts and repairs
Bills on your phone
A phone, its cover and a screen guard on one bill, sent on WhatsApp before the buyer leaves the counter.
GST bills
GST worked out on each item, so the copy a buyer keeps for the warranty is right first time.
Credit book (khata)
A village buyer pays a part on the days the shared taxi brings him in, and his page keeps each day and what is due.
Low stock warnings
A warning when a fast-selling model or a charger type runs low, before a customer asks for it.
Orders to suppliers
Orders to the distributor, with what arrived checked against what was asked for, box by box.
UPI payments
A part-payment on a phone made by UPI shows beside the bill it paid, with the rest still on the buyer's page.
Where a Meghalaya phone shop loses track
A village buyer's first phone, and the questions that fill the counter
A buyer from a village that has only just got a signal asks for a phone and does not know the model, the memory or the colour. You ask question after question, with the same phone in three colours and two memory sizes on the shelf behind you, and the chargers and covers beside it are cut for one model each. By the time the right blue one is found, the buyer has walked to the next shop on the street.
Customers want a proper bill
A phone is a big buy, and buyers in town ask for a GST bill they can keep for the warranty. Writing it by hand takes time while the next customer waits at the counter, and one wrong number means doing it again. A lost bill also means a long argument when the phone comes back for repair.
Repairs that wait on a part
A phone comes in with a cracked screen and the part has to be ordered from a bigger market, and it comes up by shared taxi. The customer calls every morning to ask whether it has come. The repair lives on a slip in a drawer, and the advance taken for the part is easy to forget when the phone goes back.
The sale, the warranty and the new village customer
Each model, colour and memory size on its own line
Add a phone the way it sits in the box: the model, the colour, 64 or 128 GB. Every sale takes one off, so when someone asks for the blue one you know before you reach the shelf, and the next order to the distributor is written from the count, not from memory.
A bill on the buyer's own phone before the shared taxi leaves
A buyer takes a phone from town to a village up the hill road. Pick the phone and its cover, and the bill works out the GST. Send it on WhatsApp before the shared taxi leaves, so when the phone needs a warranty repair months later the bill is already on the buyer's own phone, and nobody travels back to ask for it.
New customers from the villages
In April 2022, officials said 1,164 of Meghalaya's 6,839 villages had no mobile network at all, and BSNL approved 352 new towers to reach them. The first buyers from such a village all ask the same: which phone, which SIM, which charger. A shop that holds each model with its own count can tell him at once what it has.
Phone shops across Meghalaya's districts
Every district in Meghalaya buys and sells in its own way, and a phone shop sees it in what people come in for.
- In Shillong, Bara Bazaar (Iewduh) has shops for traditional Khasi materials and household goods, and Police Bazaar sells Meghalaya goods, regional clothes and handicrafts.
- West Garo Hills' district site lists local makers of tribal-design jewellery, including Seven Cherri, which employs local tribal women, and Amis Jewellery in Tura.
- In West Jaintia Hills about 70% of people depend on farming. Potato, ginger, garlic and turmeric are the main cash crops, and the district is home to Lakadong turmeric.
- In Ri Bhoi, Byrnihat has an industrial estate, while farming is the main work in blocks such as Umling, and bamboo and cane work is a local craft.
- A jackfruit processing unit opened at Rongara, South Garo Hills, in February 2024. It can process over 700 tonnes a year, and the state says it will raise the income of about 8,000 farmers.
Questions Meghalaya phone and electronics shops ask
A buyer from a new-signal village wants the charger and cover for his model. Can I show all three?
Yes. Name the charger and cover with the phone's model. Search it and the phone, charger and cover sit together, each with its count.
A box comes by shared taxi with parts for two jobs. How do I know which is whose?
Each part is on your order to the supplier. Note each arrival against its order. The job waiting on that part is first on the bench.
Can I take an advance for a repair part?
Yes. The part is bought with the advance, so bill the repair with the advance paid now. The part comes by shared taxi, and the page shows what is still to be paid when the phone goes back.
Can I sell second-hand phones beside new ones?
Yes. Keep a used phone as its own line by model, colour and memory size, apart from the new phone of the same model. The new blue one and the used blue one then have separate counts, so a used phone on the shelf never hides that the new one is sold out.
Shops and markets in Meghalaya
Shillong's Iewduh (Bara Bazar) market has hundreds of vendors and traders selling vegetables, meat, fish and groceries, and draws traders from across Meghalaya, who need chargers and covers for their phones.
In December 2016 hundreds of small sellers in Shillong's big farmers' markets signed up to take QR-code payments without a card machine.
On Christmas Eve, a report from Shillong noted long queues outside well-known bakeries, with Police Bazar and Iewduh crowded with people buying clothes, food and other Christmas things.
Summer in Meghalaya runs about five months, May to September, with heavy monsoon rain; the damp kills chargers and wets phones.
Mawsynram in East Khasi Hills, the wettest place on Earth, gets nearly 12,000 mm of rain a year.