This is an odd thing for a software business to publish. We would rather say it than have you find out later.
There are billing apps built for Indian small businesses that do a genuinely good job. They handle invoices, stock, customer dues, and tax returns. They work without internet. They cost roughly what one restaurant meal costs per month. If what you need is billing and a record of who owes you money, buy one of those. We would.
So what is left for someone like us? Less than most software companies would admit, and it matters more than they let on.
Four questions that settle it
Is this the part that makes your business different, or the part every business has?
Every business issues bills. Every business pays tax. Nothing about how your shop does those things is special, and there is no advantage in having your own version — you are just paying to rebuild something that already exists and works.
But how a study room handles seats, or how a warehouse tracks stock across delivery vehicles, or how a clinic decides who needs following up today — those differ from business to business, sometimes from street to street. That is where a ready-made app starts to pinch.
Does an app already do about eighty per cent of it?
Then buy the app and live with the other twenty. This sounds like a compromise and it is, but the arithmetic is brutal: building something custom to cover that last twenty per cent usually costs several times more than the entire app.
Custom work earns its price when an app does thirty per cent of the job, not when it does eighty.
Are you asking about one job, or your whole business?
"Should I buy software or have it built" has no single answer, and anyone who gives you one is selling.
The right answer is usually both, for different jobs. Buy the billing app. Build the one odd thing the billing app was never going to cover. A business can perfectly sensibly do both at once, and the ones that do end up spending less than the ones that pick a side.
Is anyone already keeping a side notebook?
This is the giveaway, and it costs nothing to check.
If a member of staff is keeping their own notebook, or a separate list on their phone, next to software the business already pays for — something real about the work cannot be expressed in that software. That gap is what custom work is for.
If nobody is keeping a side notebook, and people are broadly getting on with what they have, an app is very likely the right answer and you should keep your money.
What the ready-made apps do better than us
Worth being straight about, because it is a long list.
They are far cheaper. They handle tax returns and electronic invoicing, which is required by law and genuinely difficult, and which we do not do. They work with no internet, which matters here. They have a support desk open on Sunday. They keep adding features paid for by thousands of other customers. And they do not depend on one person in Imphal being well that week.
Anyone telling you custom software is simply better than all of that is not being straight with you.
What is actually left for us
One thing: fit.
Those apps are products. You bend your business to them. That is a fair trade for billing, where every business does roughly the same thing anyway. It stops being a fair trade at the point where the software cannot express what your business actually does.
A study room we built for needed a public page where a seat could be shown as waiting — money sent, proof not yet checked — with an expiry date attached to the student. That is not a missing feature in some app. It is a shape that no product was ever going to have, because the room is the only place that works exactly that way.
That is the work worth paying for. Everything else, buy.
If you are not sure which you have
Send us the thing you keep checking by hand. If the honest answer is that an app covers it, we will tell you which kind of app to look for and that will be the end of it. It costs you nothing and it costs us nothing, and both of us are better off than if you had bought the wrong thing.