Five signs your coal business has outgrown Excel and WhatsApp

Excel and WhatsApp run a large part of India's coal trade. They are familiar and flexible, and for one yard and a handful of customers they work well enough.

As the business grows, they start to cost more than they save. Here are five signs.

Sign 1: The same data lives in several places. If the stock register, sales ledger and dispatch log are separate files that have to be matched by hand, the numbers drift apart every time someone updates one and forgets another.

Sign 2: More time goes into typing than deciding. When one dispatch means entering the same party, quality and truck details in three sheets, you are paying skilled people to do clerical work.

Sign 3: Simple questions take too long. How much coal of a given quality is in all your yards right now? What does a customer owe after adjusting advances? If the answer needs a phone call and a spreadsheet, the system is too slow.

Sign 4: Mistakes grow with the business. More branches, customers and trucks bring more rate errors, weight mismatches and invoice corrections — and manual checking can't keep up.

Sign 5: GST and audit time is painful. If every return or audit query means pulling data from several places and cross-checking by hand, the figures should already be sitting in one set of records.

Recognising the signs is the first step. The next is choosing something that fits your business — not the other way round.