Choosing a van sales app in Tamil Nadu: seven tests to run first

Most van sales apps are demonstrated on a laptop in an office with good Wi-Fi. Your salesman will use it on a four-year-old phone, on a road outside Thuckalay or Pollachi, with a shop owner waiting. These are the tests worth running before you commit, and what we found when we ran them on our own app.

We make Mulberry Sales, in Nagercoil. Where our app falls short on one of these, we say so.

1. GST that changes at the border, bill by bill

Tamil Nadu’s GST state code is 33. A bill to a shop inside the state carries CGST and SGST. A bill to a registered shop across the border — Kerala (32), Karnataka (29), Puducherry (34), Andhra Pradesh (37) — carries IGST instead. A distributor in Kanyakumari, Coimbatore, Krishnagiri or Villupuram district can do both before lunch.

The test: bill a registered Kerala shop and a Tamil Nadu shop, one after the other, without touching a setting. The app should pick the split from the shop’s GSTIN, bill by bill. An app with one tax switch for the whole business will get one of the two wrong.

Ours: decides per bill, from your GSTIN and the shop’s. Where it cannot tell — a shop across the border with no GSTIN — it falls back to your workspace’s default. If you bill unregistered shops in another state regularly, tell us before you start.

2. The right heading if you are not registered

Plenty of small distributors are below the GST threshold. A business that is not registered cannot charge GST, and its bills should not say “Tax Invoice” or show tax lines.

Ours: a workspace with no GSTIN gets “Bill of Supply” on its bills, with no tax. One gap: if you are registered under the composition scheme, you have a GSTIN but must also issue a Bill of Supply, and our app does not do that for you yet. Composition dealers should talk to us first.

3. Signal on the ghat roads and the back lanes

Every route has a stretch with no signal — hill roads, a market in a basement, the far end of a village. A van app that needs the internet to save a bill will fail there, and the salesman will go back to paper.

The test: switch the phone to aeroplane mode, raise a bill, switch it back, and check the bill reached the office with the right time on it.

Ours: bills, stock requests and field notes save on the phone and send when the signal returns. Not every screen works offline, so run the test on the screens your men use most.

4. The salesman’s language

Most van salesmen in the state think in Tamil and read product names in English off the carton. Ask whether the app’s screens can be in Tamil, and whether your shop and product names can be typed in Tamil and still print correctly.

Ours: the app’s screens are in English today. This website is in Tamil and English, we train your salesmen at your godown, and you can ask us anything in Tamil on WhatsApp. If a Tamil app screen is a must for your men, that is a fair reason to keep looking.

5. The bill on WhatsApp

Shop owners here expect the bill on WhatsApp, and a PDF they can forward to their own accountant. The test: send one from the van, and open it on an ordinary phone. Ours: the salesman sends the bill to the shop on WhatsApp from his phone, straight after saving it.

6. The cheapest phone your men carry

Test on the oldest, slowest phone in the team, not the owner’s. Ours: Android 6.0 or newer. There is no iPhone app yet; the owner’s screens open in any browser.

7. Who types in your shops and products

The first week decides whether the app sticks, and the first week is mostly data entry: three hundred shops, two hundred products, opening balances. Ask who does it. Ours: send us your lists in any Excel sheet, or photographs of the book you keep now; we enter them and train your salesmen at your godown before your free days start. That is how starting works.

The one we do not pass

If your loads need e-way bills, or your turnover means your B2B bills need e-invoices, we generate neither. Keep doing those on the GST portal or in your accounting software, or choose an app that does them.

For everything else, see what the van app does, read van sales versus pre-sales, or check the prices.