The hand-written register works until it does not. One book, one person who can read the handwriting, and a month-end evening spent totalling columns. Most shop owners we talk to already know they want to move — what stops them is the setup. The usual story is weeks of data entry before the software prints a single bill, and the migration dies somewhere in week two.
Polaris inverts the order. Your first bill is made inside the setup wizard, before you have entered a single line of history, and the rest of the ledger comes in afterwards, gradually, with our help. Here is exactly how that works.
What to keep on hand
Before you start the wizard, you need four things. The full stock list and the full customer book are deliberately absent from it:
- Your shop name and phone number.
- One customer’s name and number — or nothing, because you can bill a walk-in customer.
- One product and its selling price.
- One answer: do your printed prices already include GST, or is it added on top?
The 5 steps
- Shop. Your name and phone. This becomes your invoice header, so the bill you make in the Bills step already looks like yours.
- Customer. One name and phone number. If your trade is mostly walk-ins, skip this — walk-in billing works without any customer record.
- Product. Name and price. Units, batches, and stock counts can all come later.
- Bills. Pick the customer, pick the product, take payment, and print it or share it over WhatsApp. Tax settings live here too: tell Polaris whether prices are GST-inclusive or exclusive, and correct individual products later.
- Ready. The completion screen. It hands you the finished account and gets out of the way.
Any step you do not need, you skip — all 5 are skippable. And the wizard saves on the server as you go, so if you start it on the shop computer and finish it on your phone in the evening, it picks up where you left off. No IT person in the room, and nothing lost if you are interrupted.
The tax setting deserves one more sentence, because it is the one owners hesitate on. If your shelf price is what the customer pays, tax included, that is inclusive pricing. If you add GST on top at the till, that is exclusive. Answer it once for the shop, correct individual products later if some behave differently — and if you are not GST-registered at all, leave it alone.
What happens after
The first bill proves the system works for your shop, and that matters more than it sounds. A migration that starts with data entry gives you weeks of work before any payoff. A migration that starts with a real bill gives you the payoff first — from that point on, every sale you ring up is already digital, and only the history is left to move.
Then the backfill starts, and you do not do it alone: as part of free setup, our team helps you enter your customer list, supplier list, and stock — from Excel sheets or straight from the hand-written ledger. You keep billing while the history fills in behind you.
One thing we should be honest about: there is no one-click importer from Tally or QuickBooks yet. If your data lives in one of those, we export it and re-enter it manually, together with you, as part of setup. That is slower than a magic import button, and more reliable than a broken one. When a direct importer exists, it will be because it works.
The cost of trying
The trial is 14 days and does not ask for a card. The realistic worst case is that you run the 5 steps, print one bill, and go back to the register. The realistic best case is that the bill you print on day one is the last kind of bill you write by hand. If you get stuck on any step, message us on WhatsApp and we will walk through it with you.