What you need from construction billing depends almost entirely on how your bills get raised — at a counter, on a site, after an event, or monthly against a connection. This page takes those seriously before it mentions anything we sell.
The question to ask before any feature list
There is one question that predicts whether a billing system will suit a business, and it is not about features. It is: how does a bill get raised here?
At a counter with a queue, the only thing that matters is seconds per bill — scanning, a saved customer, a printer that works. On a site or after an event, nothing is urgent but the detail is complicated, and what matters is that the bill can be checked against what was agreed. Billed monthly against a connection or a tenancy, it is a schedule, and what matters is that last month is remembered.
Those three shapes want different things, and a system built for one is uncomfortable in another. Work out which one you are before reading anyone's feature list, including ours.
Construction and contractor billing
Construction bills are measured, certified and cumulative, which makes them unlike almost every other invoice. The line is an area, a stage, a day rate or a percentage of work certified — never a simple quantity at a rate.
The usual document is a running account bill: work done to date, less what has already been billed, giving the amount now due. Retention held back, advances being recovered and the certified quantity all belong on the face of it, because that is what the client's engineer is approving. A bill that cannot be checked against the measurement book does not get paid; it gets returned.
On tax, these are services carrying a SAC. Where both material and labour are supplied the treatment follows how the contract is written, and works-contract and composite supply treatment is not a free choice — settle it at contract stage with your accountant, not at billing stage. Tax deducted at source and statutory recoveries are shown below the taxable value as deductions, never netted off the line, or the tax is computed on the wrong figure.
Fit, honestly: this raises the invoices, holds the tax treatment and reports. It is not project costing or a measurement-book system, so the measurement itself stays wherever you keep it today.
What you get on the free plan
- Complete GST tax invoices with every legally required field, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers and items stored once, with GSTIN, state, HSN or SAC and rate held against them.
- Tax derived rather than typed — per line, from the item rate and the place of supply.
- One numbering series, issued centrally and consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- An answer to "who owes me what", aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export — CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0, no card, no expiry.
Setting it up for your trade
- Start free now — email and password, no card.
- Enter your business name, address and GSTIN once.
- Add your items with their HSN or SAC codes and their own rates, or import the list from a spreadsheet.
- Add the customers you bill regularly, with GSTIN and state where they are registered.
- Set the number your invoice series should carry on from, so nothing restarts mid-year.
- Raise one real bill and print it on the printer you actually use. This is the test that matters.
- Time yourself on five bills at your own counter before you decide anything.
What a billing system cannot do for a trade
Worth saying plainly, because a page like this is usually written the other way round. Billing software issues documents, keeps records and reports. It does not run the trade-specific machinery around them.
It will not integrate with your weighing scale, your fuel dispensers, your kitchen display or your network provisioning. It does not hold clinical records or manage appointments. It does not do production planning, project costing or time capture. Where any of those is the actual problem, a billing system is not the answer to it and will not become one.
What it does do is the part every trade shares: a correct document, a numbering series that holds, tax computed rather than typed, a record of who owes what, and figures that a return can be built from. That is a narrow job done properly.
The sensible way to choose is to write down the three things that would make the software useless to you, then test those three first. Features are easy to compare and mostly not the deciding factor.
Stock, and why billing is the only place it can be captured
Stock records fail for one reason: they are maintained separately from billing. A count done on Sunday is accurate on Sunday and fiction by Wednesday, because the sales that happened in between went onto bills and not into the stock sheet.
The only arrangement that holds is the one where the bill is the stock movement — an item sold reduces stock because it was billed, not because someone remembered to adjust it. Then a closing figure is derived rather than counted, and a physical count becomes a check on the records instead of being the records.
That is also what makes shrinkage visible. The difference between what the records say and what is on the shelf is information; without records there is no difference to look at, only a number.
Purchases have to come in the same way, which is the half people skip. Stock that goes out through billing and comes in through a note in a diary is still fiction, just slower.
What a GST invoice legally has to carry
Rule 46 of the CGST Rules sets out what a tax invoice must show, and it is a longer list than most invoice templates carry. Getting one field wrong does not usually cost you anything the day you raise it — it costs your customer their input credit months later, which is a harder conversation.
The fields are:
- Your name, address and GSTIN
- A consecutive invoice number, unique within the financial year
- The date of issue
- The customer's name, address and GSTIN where they are registered
- Place of supply, and the state code, for inter-state supplies
- HSN or SAC against every line
- Description, quantity, unit, rate and taxable value per line
- Rate and amount of CGST, SGST/UTGST, IGST and cess, shown separately
- Whether tax is payable on reverse charge
- Signature or digital signature of the supplier or an authorised person
Billixo fills these in from the customer and product records rather than asking you to remember them, which is the only reliable way a busy counter gets them all right every time.
CGST, SGST and IGST — worked out, not chosen
Whether a sale attracts CGST and SGST or IGST is not a preference. It follows from the place of supply: same state as your registration means the tax splits into central and state halves, a different state means one integrated tax at the combined rate.
That sounds simple and goes wrong constantly, because it is a dropdown in most billing software and a dropdown is something a tired person clicks past. In Billixo the split is derived from the state on the customer record against the state on your registration, and it changes the moment either does.
The consequence of getting it wrong is real: an IGST invoice raised as CGST/SGST has to be credited and reissued, and if the return has already gone in, amended.
The AI, and what it is actually for
The useful application of AI to billing is not a chatbot. It is the twenty minutes a day spent retyping things that already exist on paper.
- Scan a supplier bill. Photograph it; the lines, the GSTIN, the tax and the totals come back as a draft you check rather than a form you fill.
- Find the HSN code. Describe the product in plain words and get a code to confirm, instead of scrolling a list of eleven thousand.
- Ask about your own numbers. "What is outstanding over sixty days?" answered from your data, not a manual.
- Write the reminder. A polite, specific chase for an overdue invoice, ready to send on WhatsApp.
Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for it, and the platform runs on whichever model it has been configured with — including one hosted on your own server.
Who this actually suits
It fits a business that raises between a handful and a few hundred invoices a month and would rather not think about GST between the 10th and the 20th: traders, distributors, retail counters, workshops, agencies, consultants, contractors and manufacturers who sell on invoice.
It fits less well if you need deep manufacturing costing, multi-currency consolidation, or payroll — those are different products, and pretending otherwise wastes your evaluation time.
If you are not sure which side of that line you fall on, the free plan answers it in an afternoon at no cost. Start free now.
What "free" means here, exactly
The Free plan costs nothing, needs no card, and has no expiry date. It is not a trial that turns into a bill; it is a plan you can run a small business on indefinitely.
What it gives you:
- Real GST invoices with the full Rule 46 field set
- Customers and products, with HSN/SAC held against each
- A daily and monthly invoice allowance, generous enough for a small operation
- One login
- Export of your own data, whenever you want it
What it does not give you:
- A watermark-free PDF
- GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B export
- The AI features — bill scanning, HSN lookup, the assistant
- Extra team logins, bulk import, recurring invoices and reminders
Every new account also gets the full paid feature set for its first 14 days, so you can see what the ceiling looks like before deciding whether you need it. When that ends nothing is charged and nothing is deleted — the account simply settles onto Free.
Start free now — it takes an email address and about a minute.
Where your data lives
On the server this platform is installed on. Every record carries a company identifier and every query is scoped to the signed-in account at the framework level, so one business cannot read another’s data by any route, including a crafted one.
Sign-in is rate limited, sessions can be restricted to one device per user, and passwords are stored hashed. Exports are available on every plan, free included: if you ever want to leave, your data leaves with you.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use a barcode scanner?
A USB scanner works the way it does with any web form: it types the code into the field. The value is not the speed so much as that a scanned item cannot be the wrong item at the wrong rate.
Does it work without internet?
No — it runs in a browser and needs a connection to issue a bill. If your counter loses internet for long stretches that is a genuine reason to choose something local instead, and it is better to know now than after you have moved your data.
Can more than one person bill at the same time?
On the paid plans, yes, with separate logins and one shared numbering series so two tills cannot produce the same invoice number. The free plan is a single login.
Is it really free?
Yes. The Free plan is ₹0, needs no card and has no expiry. It has volume limits and leaves out the paid conveniences — watermark-free PDFs, GST return exports, the AI features, extra logins — but the invoices it produces are real GST invoices, and you can export your data from it whenever you like.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It runs in a browser, on a laptop, desktop or phone, so there is nothing to install, nothing to update and nothing tied to one machine. If the office computer dies, you sign in from another one and everything is there.
Try it — the demo is the product
There is no sales call and no scheduled demo, because a recorded walkthrough of somebody else’s data tells you nothing about your own. Open an account instead and raise a real invoice for a real customer; it takes about a minute and costs nothing.
Open the software demo → — sign in, or create a free account from the same screen.
See full details on the home page → — features, the AI, pricing and the answers to the usual questions.
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