UAE Litres, tins and drums · trade accounts · 5% VAT

Paint shop software that tells one shade from another.

A paint shop does not stock paint. It stocks three thousand things that differ by one word on the label, in three pack sizes, and most of the money is tied up in the ones nobody has asked for since last year.

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Counter sale INV-2184 · Deira Posted

Emulsion · Brilliant White · 18LAED 315.00

Wood primer · 4LAED 96.00

Thinner · 4LAED 52.00

Roller setAED 34.00

VAT 5%AED 24.85

TotalAED 521.85

Four items out of stock at real cost · revenue and VAT posted

The problem

Every shade looks the same on a shelf, and none of them cost the same.

Paint is a deceptive trade to stock. The variety that makes you useful to a contractor is the same variety that quietly buries your working capital.

Monday

A painter wants forty litres of a colour in matt. You have it in silk. Nobody can say from the counter whether the other branch has matt, so you sell him silk and hope.

Tuesday

Eight unopened tins come back from a job that was cancelled. They go on a shelf. They do not go back on any stock figure, because nobody raises anything.

Wednesday

The supplier raises trade prices. The counter keeps selling last month’s stock at a margin calculated against last month’s cost, and nobody notices for six weeks.

Thursday

A contractor collects on account. The delivery is written in a book. At the end of the month the statement and the book disagree, and the argument is with a customer you want to keep.

This year

Roughly a quarter of the shelf has not moved at all. It is not obvious, because it is spread thinly across two hundred shades that each look like a small amount.

Where the money actually isCapital, in tins, in colours nobody asked for

No single dead shade is worth worrying about. Two hundred of them is your overdraft. The only way to see it is to have been counting each one separately all along.

Stock

Paint shop inventory software, shade by shade.

How paint stock actually works here — and it is worth being precise, because this is the part every paint shop gets sold badly.

A shade is an item, not a note on an item

Each colour, finish and pack size you stock is its own item on the item master, with its own code, category, brand and unit. Emulsion · Brilliant White · 18L is one item; the same colour in 4L is another; the same colour in silk is another again.

That is what makes stock, valuation and reorder level work per shade rather than per product family. Worth being straight about the trade-off: colour and finish live inside the item’s code and naming, not as separate structured fields you can filter on independently, so a consistent naming order is worth deciding on day one.

Sold in the unit you actually sell in

A litre is not a tin and a tin is not a drum. Each item carries its own unit of measure, so what leaves the shelf and what leaves the stock ledger are the same quantity.

If you genuinely break bulk — a 200L drum decanted into 20L pails — hold the two as separate items and move between them with a goods issue and a receipt. The ledger records the cost correctly either way.

Cost that follows the supplier, not your memory

Paint prices move, and they move mid-season. Stock is valued at a moving weighted-average cost, so a tin leaves the shelf at what it actually cost you across the deliveries it came in on.

Imported drums land at their real cost too — freight, duty and clearing spread across the shipment rather than sitting in an expense account where they never reach the margin figure.

The dead shades, surfaced

Slow and dead lines come out as a report rather than as a discovery during a clear-out. Reorder levels sit on the item, and you can simply ask the AI assistant which lines have not moved in ninety days.

Counting is sectioned, so you can check a rack at a time and post the adjustment without shutting the shop for a day.

Put one of your own deliveries through it.

No card, no setup call. Bring a supplier invoice and a day of counter sales, and watch both post.

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The counter

A trade counter is not a supermarket till.

Half your customers are painters who know exactly what they want and are already late. The other half need to be walked through a colour card. The counter has to survive both.

Find the shade, not the category

Barcode off the tin, or type the colour. The item, its price and what is on the shelf in every branch come up together, so you can answer a painter without walking anywhere.

Park it while he goes to the van

A trade customer always remembers something else. The bill holds, the queue keeps moving, and you recall it when he comes back rather than starting again.

Cash, card, split, or on account

Take it however it comes, including part cash and part card on one sale. A contractor on terms goes onto his account instead, with the balance and the aging there to look at first.

It posts itself

Stock out at real cost, revenue in, 5% VAT on the invoice with your TRN, and one balanced journal at the moment of sale. Nothing to reconcile against a till roll at the end of the week.

Return CN-0642 · unopened Credit note

Emulsion · Ivory · 18L × 8AED 2,520.00

VAT 5% reversedAED 126.00

Credited to accountAED 2,646.00

Eight tins back on the shelf · revenue, cost and VAT all reversed

Contractors and trade accounts

The customers who collect now and pay in sixty days.

A paint shop’s best customers are the ones who never pay at the counter. That makes receivables, not the till, the number that decides your month.

One account, every collection, one statement

A contractor is a receivables account. Every collection against it — whichever branch handed the tins over — lands on the same ledger, and a statement covering the month prints from it instead of being assembled from a book.

Quote a job first if that is how you work: a quotation converts to the invoice rather than being retyped, so the price the painter was given is the price he is billed.

Aging you can act on before it hurts

Receivables aging is reported by bucket, so the thirty, sixty and ninety-day columns are in front of you rather than reconstructed on the last day of the month.

Credit notes, refunds and receipts post against the account, and post-dated cheques are tracked through to clearance — which in this trade is most of the working-capital conversation.

Built for the UAE

Paint shop billing software that files the way you file.

Not a generic retail tool with a currency switch bolted on the side.

5% VAT on every document

Invoices, credit notes and purchases carry VAT as you raise them, with the totals your return needs already summed. See VAT accounting software and what e-invoicing will require.

Imported at its real cost

Buy in dollars or euros with dated exchange rates, and land freight, duty and clearing across the shipment so margin per tin is true margin.

One shop or a group

Basic covers a single branch from AED 115 a month. Multi-branch stock and transfers start on Professional at AED 215, which covers three — see pricing.

Not just a till

It’s a full ERP underneath.

The counter is one door into the same platform that carries your purchasing, your receivables and your ledger. That is the difference between a shop app and a business system — and it is why a second branch is a setting rather than a second purchase.

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Stock is one stock

Paint, thinners, brushes, rollers, tape and sundries sit in the same inventory, across every branch you run.

Purchasing is connected

Requests, orders, goods receipts and vendor bills, so a delivery updates stock and what you owe in one movement.

Real double-entry accounting

Chart of accounts, journals, AR and AP, post-dated cheques, bank reconciliation and an audit trail — the ledger is here.

Approvals where they matter

A stock adjustment over a value you set can be routed for sign-off before it posts — useful when a write-off is how dead stock disappears.

Sell to the trade as well

If you are supplying sites rather than serving a counter, that is closer to building materials trading — same platform, different documents.

Not auto refinishing

Spraying cars is a workshop job, not a counter sale — that runs on job cards in garage software instead.

FAQ

Straight answers.

Still unsure? Send us a message — a person replies, usually the same day.

Can we hold each colour separately?

Yes. Each shade, finish and pack size is its own item with its own code, category, brand and unit, so stock, valuation and reorder level are all per item. A slow-moving shade shows up as a slow-moving shade rather than disappearing into a product family.

Does it drive a tinting or colour-mixing machine?

No. There is no integration with a tinting machine and no colour formula database, so mixing stays a separate operation on whatever software came with the machine. What you can do is hold the bases and the colourants as stocked items in their own right, so what the machine consumes still comes off a real stock figure.

We buy in drums and sell in litres. How does that work?

Set the item up in the unit you receive and sell in. If you genuinely break bulk, hold the two as separate items and move stock between them with a goods issue and a receipt — the ledger records the cost correctly either way.

What happens when unopened tins come back?

A return raises a credit note against the original sale. The tins go back on the shelf as stock, and the revenue, cost of sale and VAT all reverse together, so a cancelled job does not quietly leave the sale sitting on your books.

Can contractors buy on account?

Yes. A contractor is a receivables account with payment terms, aging by bucket and a monthly statement, and post-dated cheques are tracked through to clearance. The aging is what you check before agreeing to a collection — there is no hard block that stops the counter serving an account that is over its limit.

Can I see stock in the other branch from the counter?

Yes. Stock is multi-warehouse, so one item shows what is on hand in each branch and what is on a purchase order and not yet landed. Moving stock between branches is a transfer that posts to the ledger, not a phone call somebody forgets.

Does it track batch numbers or shelf life?

No. Stock is tracked by item and quantity rather than by batch or lot, so there is no expiry report and no way to trace a specific production run. If batch traceability is a requirement for you, raise it with us before you commit.

Is the margin on my report the real margin?

Yes. Stock is valued at a moving weighted-average cost, and imported goods land with freight, duty and clearing spread across the shipment — so the margin is against what the tin actually cost you, not against a supplier price list someone typed in last season.

Do I have to buy hardware?

No. It runs in a browser on the machine you already have. A keyboard-emulating USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner, a thermal receipt printer and the cash drawer that opens off it are the usual counter additions, and all three are ordinary off-the-shelf devices.

Put a real week of sales through it.

Bring one supplier delivery and a day of counter sales, and see them posted end to end — stock in at real cost, stock out, VAT on the invoice. Fourteen days free, no card, export any time.

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