Choosing shop software in Nepal: a short, honest checklist
Most software sold to small shops here was designed for a different country. Here is what to check before you commit.
Software written elsewhere and sold here tends to fail in the same handful of ways. None of them show up in a demo. All of them show up in week two.
Check these before you pay for anything
Does it do Bikram Sambat?
Not "can it be configured to". Does the screen your staff look at all day show the date they think in? A shop books work in Bhadra. If the system says August, every deadline gets translated twice a day by a human, and humans get that wrong.
Does it identify people by phone number?
Email is not how anyone here is reached. If signing in needs an email address, someone will invent one, forget it, and lose access to the shop's own records. The number on the shop's SIM is the identity that actually persists.
What happens when the internet drops?
It will. The honest question is not whether a tool works offline (most do not) but what it does when the connection returns. Does it recover quietly, or does someone re-enter an hour of orders?
Can two people use it at once, with different powers?
The counter PC and the owner's phone are not the same actor. Staff need to take orders and move work along. They do not need to see what the shop earned, and most owners would rather they did not. If the only choice is one shared login, the shop ends up with one shared login and no privacy at all.
What does it cost, and over what term?
A monthly figure quoted for something sold in six- and twelve-month blocks is not a monthly price. Ask for the total, ask what happens at renewal, and ask what happens to your data if you stop paying.
The question that settles it
Ask to see the screen your staff will look at all day. Not the reports, not the dashboard in the brochure. The one screen that is open from opening to closing.
If that screen answers "what do we have on, and what are we owed" without a click, the rest is detail. If it does not, no amount of reporting underneath will save it.