Anyone who has run a pharmacy on paper knows the khata: one page per day, every taka in and out, in the order it happened, nothing erased. Software promised to replace it — and mostly replaced it with a sales report. Here’s the difference, and the screen that finally gives the khata back.

The report billing software cannot have

Ask most pharmacy software for “the book” and you get a list of invoices. That is the operator’s log — what was keyed in, with a profit column. Useful, and not a book. It has no line for the supplier you paid on Tuesday, the rickshaw fare from the till, the payment you voided at noon, the 180 taka the drawer came up short. Those never existed as entries, because billing-only software has no ledger to write them in.

MediPharma24 does. Every sale, purchase, return, supplier or customer payment, expense, manual voucher, opening and period close is posted to a double-entry ledger as a journal entry — and so is a drawer that closed short or over. The Day Book is that ledger’s own record, read as a book: every entry for a day or a range, oldest first, with its debit and credit lines beneath it. Not a list of what you sold — the record of what the books wrote.

Every entry has a number

A paper khata has a habit software usually forgets: the pages are numbered, and none is torn out. The Day Book keeps it with a voucher number.

Every journal entry takes one the moment it is posted — a single sequence for the shop, six digits (000123), never reset. Not per month, not per type: sales, payments, expenses, manual vouchers, reversals and voids all take the next number in turn, and a number is never reissued. The sale keeps its invoice number beside it; the two name different things.

Why an accountant cares: a gap says something is missing, and a number out of date order says which entry was keyed late — a posting back-dated to last week takes today’s next number, and shows itself by it. The book doesn’t ask you to trust that nothing was deleted. It lets you count.

Reading the book

It lives under Reports → Finance, beside the trial balance, profit & loss and balance sheet. It opens on Today; Yesterday, Last 7 days or a custom range up to a year are a tap away.

Across the top, the ledger’s own totals: how many entries, total debit, total credit, one tile per voucher kind — and the cash position of every money account (cash, bank, wallets) as at the last day of the range. That one is a balance, not a movement, so the filters never touch it.

Below, the book, opening compact — one row per entry:

voucher number · kind · date · narration · who · amount

Tap a row and its lines open beneath it — which head, debit or credit, in the trade’s own words: Paid, Due, Discount, Rounding. The Compact switch opens the whole book at once. A sale that left something unpaid carries a Due flag with the amount. And a sale’s figure is its bill — 386 for a 386-taka sale, not the bill plus the cost of the goods that left the shelf; the cost lines stay beneath it for whoever wants them. Each row opens its document: a sale its invoice, a payment its receipt.

Nothing is erased — it is struck through

A voided payment shows twice: the original, marked voided by 000241, and the void itself, marked of 000238 — each with its own number, each linking to the other, both counted, so the pair nets to zero. A reversal works the same way; openings and period closes appear too. Nothing in the range is hidden from the reader, and nothing can be made to disappear.

Tracing one head, or the accountant’s month

Three filters narrow the book: voucher kind, account head, and text over voucher numbers and narrations. Filter to Bank and you read every entry that touched it, and a line under the strip gives that head’s own debit and credit for the range — the figure its ledger statement shows, to the taka. That is what “reconcile” means, on one screen.

On paper: a PDF prints the book as you read it, naming its range and filters, a month at a time. For a quarter or a year the CSV has no cap — one row per ledger line, voucher columns and party repeated, ready for a spreadsheet.

One shop, one book

A branch owner switches to the Uttara branch and reads its book — never two shops merged, because a book that interleaves two sequences stops reconciling to anything. Staff read their own shop, and like every report the Day Book sits behind a permission you grant (Who can see what).

Where the book begins

The Day Book is the journal’s record, so it begins on the day your shop’s journal began. Open an earlier range and the screen says so — “This book starts on …” — and points you to the ledger statement for the older postings. Everything since is in the book, numbered, in order.

Where this fits

The series ends where the Day Book begins. Counting the drawer gave a shortage a note and a shift; here it sits as a numbered voucher between the day’s sales. Where cash leaks argued the leaks stop when the information exists; here is the proof, one entry at a time. The weekly five reports tell you what moved; the Day Book tells you which entry.

Open Today. Read down the page. That’s the khata — kept by the system, and it doesn’t lose pages.

This is part of a series for pharmacy owners: Counting the drawer · Where cash leaks in a pharmacy · Five reports to look at every week · the full tour.

The Day Book: The Khata, Kept by the System