How it compares
The questions worth asking any billing software.
Whether you're weighing this against Tally, Vyapar, myBillBook or something else entirely, every one of them makes the same two claims — GST compliance and being easy to use. Neither is the question that actually separates them. These five are.
Do you own the licence, or rent it?
Most billing software today is a subscription: pay every year, or the program you already paid for stops opening. That is a real, recurring cost that compounds over the life of the shop, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on before the first payment, not after the fifth.
CalcyBill’s answer
Buy it once and it does not expire — maintenance from year two is optional, and the till keeps billing without it. Or pay yearly if that suits the shop better. Both are real choices here, not one dressed up as the other.
Does it still bill when the internet does not?
Ask specifically, not generally: can a sale be completed, a bill printed and the money taken with the connection down? For software built cloud-first the honest answer is usually no, and a shop finds this out on its busiest afternoon, not before.
CalcyBill’s answer
Invoice number, items, payments, stock and ledger all commit to the shop's own machine without waiting for a network. The cloud, where it exists at all, is a copy that catches up afterwards — never a dependency of billing.
Was it built for shops in general, or for yours specifically?
A program built for 'a shop' in the abstract asks a plywood dealer and a pharmacy to configure the same blank template into something that fits. That configuration is real, unpaid work, done once by the shop and then quietly maintained forever.
CalcyBill’s answer
Sixty-one named trades, one installer — the shop picks its own on the setup screen the first time it opens, and what the Position screen tracks, what a bill's fields ask for, and which records get kept follow from that choice rather than from a generic default.
How deep do the books actually go?
Not every program that bills a customer keeps proper books behind it, and not every program that calls itself accounting software means a general ledger and a journal in the accountant's sense. Worth finding out which one you are looking at before an auditor does.
CalcyBill’s answer
Real, and honestly bounded: a day book, a cash book, a profit and loss, a position — but no general ledger, no capital account, no journal. Said plainly on What it doesn't do rather than left for a shop to discover three weeks in.
Who answers when it breaks on a Saturday?
Find out before it happens, not after. The distance between a reseller's voicemail and the person who actually wrote the code is the distance between an hour and a week — and a shop that cannot bill is not a support ticket that can wait for either.
CalcyBill’s answer
The people who built it, directly. There is no reseller in the middle and no partner network to be handed to — see Contact for what that means in practice.
What this page is not
A feature list for anything else you might be weighing this against — those change without notice, and a claim about somebody else’s product goes stale here long before anyone corrects it. What CalcyBill itself does, and just as importantly what it deliberately does not do, is written down and kept current — that part you can check.
Already have something in mind? What to check before you change billing software is the practical half of this page — the order to move in, whichever way it goes.
Bill a real day on it before deciding anything.
Thirty days free, nothing switched off, no card. The five questions above are easiest to answer with the counter actually running.