This page covers what billing in this trade actually involves, what to check in anything sold as law billing programs, and a free plan you can test the whole thing on without a card.
What is the same in every trade
Whatever you sell, if you are registered and making a taxable supply the document is a tax invoice and the field set does not change: your name, address and GSTIN; a consecutive number unique within the financial year; the date; the customer and their GSTIN where registered; place of supply on inter-state supplies; HSN or SAC against every line; the taxable value per line; and CGST, SGST/UTGST, IGST and cess shown separately rather than as one combined tax figure.
The numbering rule is the one that causes the most trouble in practice, because it cannot be enforced by a person. One consecutive series per year, no reused numbers, and a cancelled invoice keeps its number rather than giving it back.
Rates, thresholds and the scope of e-invoicing have all moved and will move again. Nothing here states a current figure for that reason — check the notification in force for your own turnover.
Law firm billing
Legal billing is mostly a records problem wearing an invoice. The fee is the easy part; what takes the work is attributing time and disbursements to the right matter and the right client, and being able to show it.
The structures in use are all different documents in practice: time billed at an hourly rate, a fixed fee for a defined piece of work, a monthly retainer, and a bill rendered at the conclusion of a matter. Disbursements sit alongside all of them and need care — court fees and similar amounts paid on the client's behalf as a pure agent, with the receipts in the client's name, sit outside your taxable value; recovered as part of your charge, they are inside it.
Advocates' own services have a particular GST position, including where reverse charge applies and who is liable to pay, and it depends on who the client is. That is genuinely worth confirming for your own practice rather than assuming — it is not the ordinary service default.
What this does: invoices, retainers, recurring bills, per-client balances and the GST treatment. What it does not: it is not practice management. No matter management, no time capture against a running timer, no conflict checks. If the time recording is the problem you are solving, this is not the product for that half of it.
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.
Judging any billing system in half an hour
- Load ten of your own items, including two at different tax rates, rather than using the demo data.
- Raise a bill with both rates on it and check the tax is computed per line, not once on the total.
- Print it on your own printer, on the paper or roll you actually use.
- Raise a second bill and confirm the number advanced by itself.
- Cancel one and check the number was not handed back for reuse.
- Add a customer with a GSTIN and confirm an inter-state supply switches to IGST without being asked.
- Export everything you just entered, and open the file. If you cannot, stop there.
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.
Invoice numbering: one unbroken series per year
The invoice number has to be consecutive, unique within the financial year, and no more than sixteen characters of letters, numbers, slashes and hyphens. Gaps invite questions. Duplicates cause them.
This is the single most common reason a spreadsheet-based billing setup fails an audit: two people billing on two machines, both starting from the last number they remember. A system that issues the number centrally cannot make that mistake.
The series restarts on 1 April, and Billixo restarts it for you rather than waiting to be told.
Credit notes, debit notes, and fixing a wrong invoice
An issued tax invoice is not something to edit. If the value was too high, or goods came back, the correction is a credit note that references the original invoice. If it was too low, a debit note. Both carry their own numbers and both appear in your return.
There is a deadline on the credit note that matters: the adjustment has to be declared by the return for the relevant month of the following financial year, or by the annual return, whichever comes first. Past that, the note exists commercially but the tax cannot be adjusted.
Software that lets you quietly retype an invoice raised last month is not doing you a favour.
Bill scanning, in practice
The single largest time cost in most small businesses is not raising invoices — it is entering purchases. A photograph of a supplier bill goes in and a structured draft comes out: supplier, GSTIN, line items, rates, tax split and total.
You check it. That is the workflow, and it is deliberate: an extraction you did not read is a liability, not a saving. But checking a filled form takes fifteen seconds and typing one takes three minutes, and that difference compounds over a month of purchases.
Who it is built for
Small and mid-sized Indian businesses that are registered under GST and bill regularly. One person doing everything, or a counter with three people billing at once and an accountant who needs the month to close cleanly.
The design assumption throughout is that whoever raises the invoice is busy and is not a tax specialist. So the tax is computed rather than asked for, the compliance fields are populated rather than presented as questions, and the report the accountant wants is a download rather than a request.
Try it free — the free plan needs no card and does not expire.
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.
Reliability, backups and getting your data out
Cloud billing software is only as good as its worst day. Two things matter more than any feature list: that your data is backed up somewhere you can reach, and that you can export it in a format something else can read.
Exports here are CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one, covering customers, products, invoices and payments. That is the honest test of whether software respects you — not what it promises, but what it lets you take when you leave.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free plan?
Yes. The Free plan is ₹0, needs no card and has no expiry date. It carries volume limits, a single login and a small watermark on the PDF, and the invoice it issues is a complete GST tax invoice. Every new account also gets the full paid feature set for its first fortnight so you can see the ceiling before deciding.
Will it work for my trade specifically?
Test it rather than take anyone's word. Load ten of your own items including two at different tax rates, raise a real bill, print it on your own printer and time yourself. Half an hour on the free plan tells you more than any feature list, including this one.
Does it handle items at different tax rates on one bill?
Yes — the rate is held against the item and the tax is computed per line, then totalled per head. That is the only correct treatment for a mixed basket and it is not optional in retail.
Will my accountant be able to work with it?
That is what the GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries are for. They export in formats a practitioner can open and reconcile without repairing the file first — which, in practice, is most of what a CA wants from a client’s billing software.
What happens to my data if I stop paying?
Nothing is deleted. The account settles back onto the Free plan: the paid conveniences switch off, the volume limits return, and every invoice, customer and product you created stays exactly where it is — including the export.
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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