One customer buys a pen. The next wants three hundred lines quoted, delivered to four campuses and invoiced in thirty days — and both have to come off the same stock figure and land in the same books.
Stationery is a seasonal business pretending to be a steady one. Whatever goes wrong in the fortnight before term starts is what the rest of the year spends its time recovering from.
No single mispriced line on a school order is worth chasing. That is exactly why it survives — and why the contract margin is never quite what the quotation implied.
The contract half of a stationery business is one long document chain. Every hand-off in it is a chance for a price to change without anyone deciding to change it.
Build the quotation once. Next term you copy it rather than rebuilding it in a spreadsheet from whichever version somebody saved, which is where the drifted prices come from.
Quotations are sent to be accepted or rejected, so the agreed price on three hundred lines is a record on the document rather than a memory of a phone call.
The accepted quotation converts without anyone re-keying a line. Larger orders can be routed for sign-off before they commit stock.
The delivery posts out of stock as it goes, so what left the shelf and what left the ledger are the same thing — even when the counter is busy at the same time.
The invoice carries 5% VAT and your TRN and matches the quotation the school accepted. At month end one statement covers every delivery on the account.
No card, no setup call. Bring a real quotation and watch it become an order, a delivery and an invoice.
The counter half of the business is ordinary retail. What makes it hard is the depth — and the fact that the season punishes anything you got wrong in June.
Pens, files, reams, exercise books, art supplies and the forty things nobody thinks of until September — each is its own item with its own code, category, brand and unit of measure.
That is what makes a reorder level per item useful. A shop that stocks four thousand lines cannot hold a picture of any of them in its head.
Reorder levels sit on the item, and you can ask the AI assistant which lines are below theirs or what has not moved in ninety days — in June, while there is still time to do something about it.
Last term’s accepted quotations are the demand forecast you already own, because they are still on the system rather than in somebody’s spreadsheet.
Stock is multi-warehouse, so the shop floor, the back store and a second branch are locations of the same item. A campus delivery and a walk-in sale draw down the same number.
Moving stock between branches is a transfer that posts, so nothing leaves one location without arriving at another.
Stock is valued at a moving weighted-average cost, so a ream leaves at what it actually cost across the deliveries it came in on rather than at whatever the supplier last quoted.
Imported cartons land with freight, duty and clearing spread across the shipment, which is the difference between contract margin and contract revenue.
In the last week of August the counter is the whole business. It has to be quick, and it has to keep telling the truth about stock while the contract side is loading a van out of the same store.
Barcode or search at the till, on a counter machine or a tablet. Park a bill while a parent goes back for the highlighters, and take payment as cash, card, or split across both.
The receipt carries 5% VAT, with a full tax invoice for the parent who needs one for an employer.
Every sale carries the cashier and the shift. At close the opening float, the expected cash and the counted cash are recorded and the variance is calculated for you.
Returns and voids are logged against whoever processed them — which matters most in the fortnight when you have taken on seasonal staff.
The contract customers are the ones worth having and the ones that decide your cash position. Both facts live in receivables rather than at the till.
Deliveries to four sites bill to one account and appear on one monthly statement, instead of four conversations with four administrators.
Receivables aging by bucket, so the thirty, sixty and ninety-day columns are in front of you rather than reconstructed at the end of a term.
Post-dated cheques from school and office accounts are tracked inside receivables from the day they are handed over through to the day they clear.
Not a generic retail tool with a currency switch bolted on the side.
Quotations, 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.
Buy in dollars or euros with dated exchange rates, and land freight, duty and clearing across the shipment so contract margin is true margin.
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.
The counter and the contract desk are two doors into the same platform — the same stock, the same receivables, the same ledger. That is why the busy fortnight does not need a second system bolted alongside the first.
See the full feature listCounter lines, contract lines and the back store sit in the same inventory, across every branch you run.
Requests, orders, goods receipts and vendor bills, so a June delivery updates stock and what you owe in one movement.
Chart of accounts, journals, AR and AP, post-dated cheques, bank reconciliation and an audit trail — the ledger is here.
A sales order or a stock adjustment over a value you set can be routed for sign-off before it commits anything.
Laptops and hardware to the same schools is a slightly different order shape — see computer shop software.
If the counter is a side line and you are really supplying resellers, that is trading and distribution.
Still unsure? Send us a message — a person replies, usually the same day.
Yes. Quotations go out for the customer to accept or reject, and an accepted one becomes a sales order without anyone re-entering a line. On a three-hundred-line school order that is the difference between an afternoon and a minute.
Not as a stored price list. There is no per-customer rate card that prices an order automatically, so the agreed price lives on the quotation you raised and accepted. In practice most shops copy last term’s quotation for the same school, which carries the agreed prices forward — but it is worth knowing it is a document, not a rule.
Yes. Deliveries to several campuses bill to one account, receivables aging is reported by bucket, and a monthly statement prints from the same ledger the invoices posted to. Post-dated cheques are tracked through to clearing.
Yes. A delivery posts out of stock as it goes and what has not shipped stays on the sales order, so a term-start order that arrives in four vans is still one order with a running balance rather than four disconnected documents.
Yes. VAT is calculated on quotations, invoices, credit notes and purchases as you raise them, in AED, with the totals your return needs already summed and your TRN on the tax invoice.
Yes. Stock is tracked per warehouse or branch, and moving it between them is a transfer that posts on both sides. Multi-branch starts on the Professional plan, which covers 1 branches.
A section at a time. Counts are sectioned rather than all-or-nothing, so you can check a bay, post the adjustment and read the variance by item and by value without closing the shop for a day.
Yes. Stock leaves at a moving weighted-average cost, and imported cartons land with freight, duty and clearing spread across the shipment — so the contract margin is against what the goods actually cost you, not against a supplier price list.
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.
Bring one school quotation and a day of counter sales, and see them posted end to end — order, delivery, invoice, statement. Fourteen days free, no card, export any time.