Bechakena
The khatabook, on the phone.
A sales and ledger app for small shops, in Bengali first. It works with the cheap Bluetooth printer you already have, keeps working when the internet doesn't, and lets you photograph the paper records you keep now instead of typing them in.
Built for small retail in Bangladesh — general shops, hardware stores, anywhere the ledger is still a paper book.
Nobody is going to type it in.
Every app that tries to replace a paper ledger asks the shopkeeper to do the same thing: sit down and type in what's already written down. Almost nobody does. The book stays on the counter, the app gets opened twice, and that's the end of it.
So the first feature we designed wasn't a sales screen. It was a camera. Photograph the supplier's invoice or a page of the book, and the app reads the items, quantities and prices off it. You check what it read, fix what it got wrong, and save. The typing is the part we removed.
What it does
Quick sale entry
Pick the product, set the quantity, the price fills itself in. Cash, due (বাকী) or part-paid. A due sale makes you pick the customer, so the ledger can't quietly drift out of date. Print a receipt on a Bluetooth thermal printer if you want one.
Photograph the paperwork
Point the camera at a supplier invoice or a handwritten note. The app pulls out the line items and shows you what it read before anything is saved. Confirm it and it goes into stock as a purchase, or into the ledger as a payment or a due.
Customer ledgerগ্রাহক খাতা
Who owes what (পাওনা), what they've paid, and how long it's been. One tap sends the reminder on WhatsApp or SMS.
Supplier ledgerদেনা
What the shop owes, to whom, and by when. Every purchase from that supplier in one place.
Stock
Stock goes up when you record a purchase and down when you make a sale, without you doing anything about it. Low-stock alerts, and category tags you set to match the kind of shop you run.
The day at a glance
Today's sales, cash collected, total outstanding, what the stock is worth, a thirty-day trend, and an estimated profit (আনুমানিক লাভ).
Reports you can hand to someone
Daily and monthly sales, a balance sheet, a stock report — exported as PDF or Excel, in Bengali.
More than one shop, more than one person
Later on: several shops under one owner, and staff logins that can record sales without seeing the profit. Not in the first version.
Built for how shops here actually work.
It works without a connection
Sales, dues and stock are recorded on the phone and sync when the connection comes back. The shop doesn't stop because the internet did.
Bengali first, not Bengali later
Bengali interface, Bengali numerals, Bengali exports. Voice input where talking is faster than typing.
bKash and Nagad are payments too
Mobile money gets recorded as what it is, instead of being squeezed into “cash” or “due”.
Reminders where people actually read them
Due reminders go out on WhatsApp, because that's the message a customer opens.
The printer you already have
Cheap Bluetooth thermal printers. Not a new till system.
Where this is right now
In development, and earlier than ProbahiCraft Agents. The list above is the design, not a changelog — the first version will be smaller than what's on this page, and we haven't finished deciding where the line falls.
No launch date, no price, no beta. If you run a shop, or you sell to people who do, tell us which of these you'd actually use on a busy day. That's the input that decides what ships first.
Join the waitlistQuestions people ask
- Can I download it?
- Not yet. It's in development and there's nothing to install. The waitlist is the only thing open.
- Does it work without internet?
- That's the intention — record on the phone, sync when the connection returns. It's one of the reasons we're building it rather than adapting something else.
- How good is the photo reading?
- Good enough that checking it is faster than typing, which is the bar it has to clear. It's also why the app always shows you what it read and lets you fix it before anything is saved. We'll publish honest accuracy numbers when we have real ones, not before.
- Is this the same as the POS you build for clients?
- No. The POS in our nine systems is the counter inside a business system we build and hand over. This is a small mobile app of our own, for shops that don't need any of that.
- Which languages?
- Bengali first, English alongside it. Nothing else planned yet.
- What will it cost?
- We haven't decided, and we're not going to guess in public.
Next step