A practical look at ubooks billing software: invoices, inventory, purchases, receivables and the GST summaries that close a month — plus an honest note on what is out of scope.
Billing-led versus ledger-led
A ledger-led system starts from double entry: every transaction is a journal, and reports fall out of the ledger. It is complete, it is what your auditor thinks in, and it needs somebody who understands it.
A billing-led system starts from the invoice: you bill, and stock, receivables and tax summaries follow. It is faster for the people doing the work and it covers what most small businesses actually need day to day.
Billixo is billing-led. It covers invoices, purchases, inventory, payments, receivables and GST summaries. It is not a general ledger, and it does not claim to be — that is a genuinely different product and pretending otherwise wastes your evaluation time.
Billing, invoicing, accounting — which one you are buying
The words are used loosely and the products are not interchangeable, so it is worth being precise about the three.
Invoicing is the narrowest: producing the document. Billing adds the records around it — customers, items, a numbering series, stock, and what is unpaid. Accounting is the whole ledger: journals, bank reconciliation, depreciation, payroll, and the statements that come out of a trial balance.
Most searches for "accounting software" by a small business are really for the middle one, because the questions behind them are "who owes me money" and "what do I give my accountant" rather than "what is my depreciation schedule".
The arrangement that works for most small businesses: bill and keep records in a billing system continuously, and let an accountant do the accounting periodically from clean exports. The expensive alternative is a ledger nobody posts to correctly, which produces statements that have to be rebuilt anyway.
What Billixo covers
- GST invoicing with the full Rule 46 field set and the tax split derived from place of supply.
- Inventory that decrements as you bill, with low-stock warnings before you run out mid-order.
- Purchases entered from a photograph of the supplier bill — supplier, GSTIN, lines and tax as a draft you check.
- Payments and part payments recorded against invoices.
- Receivables with ageing, so the follow-up list writes itself.
- Recurring invoices for anything billed on the same day each month.
- Proforma invoices and quotations in the same numbering discipline.
- GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries exported for filing or for your CA.
- Bulk import and export — CSV and Excel in; CSV, Excel and JSON out.
- Team logins on the paid plans, each with their own credentials.
What it does not do
- A full general ledger with a chart of accounts and journal entries.
- Payroll.
- Manufacturing costing, bill of materials and work orders.
- Multi-currency consolidation.
- Statutory audit and financial statement preparation.
- If you need these, you need accounting software, and it is better to know that now than after a migration.
Setting up in about twenty minutes
- Open the free account and enter your business name, GSTIN and state.
- Add your products with HSN codes, rates and opening stock.
- Add your regular customers with GSTIN and state.
- Add your regular suppliers.
- Raise one invoice and confirm the stock moved.
- Enter one purchase — photograph the bill if you are on a paid plan or still inside the 14 days of full access.
- Look at the receivables list. That is your working screen from here on.
Working with your accountant
The handover that works is a file, not an account. GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries, a purchase register that reconciles to 2B, and exports in CSV, Excel or JSON.
That leaves your CA free to work in whatever they use, and leaves you free to change billing software later without a negotiation. Both of those are worth more than an integration that ties you to one practice.
Inventory that stays accurate
Stock goes wrong for one reason above all others: it is maintained separately from billing. Two records, updated by two people, diverging quietly until somebody counts.
The fix is not better discipline, it is a single source: stock that moves because an invoice was raised, not because someone remembered to adjust it. Purchases increase it, sales reduce it, and the count is a check rather than a reconstruction.
Low-stock warnings then become useful rather than noise, because the number they are based on is real.
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.
Reverse charge, exports and the supplies that behave differently
Not every supply is a straightforward taxable sale. Some notified supplies put the tax liability on the recipient rather than the supplier. Exports and supplies to an SEZ can be made under a bond or LUT without payment of tax, or with tax and a refund claimed afterwards. Composition dealers cannot charge tax at all and must say so on the bill.
Each of these changes what the invoice has to say — the reverse charge marking, the LUT reference, the "composition taxable person" declaration. They are not exotic cases; most businesses hit at least one.
The fields are on the invoice in Billixo whether or not you use them, so the day you need one you are not looking for a workaround.
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.
The price, plainly
Free is ₹0 and stays ₹0. The paid plans are bought for a fixed term, paid once, with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file — when a term ends the account drops back to Free until you decide to buy again.
There is no per-invoice charge, no per-user surprise on the free plan, and no feature that is technically included but practically throttled. What the plan says you get is what you get.
Compare the plans on the home page, or just start free now and look at the ceiling from the inside.
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
Does stock update automatically when I bill?
Yes. Inventory decrements on sale and increases on purchase, with low-stock warnings. The point is that there is one number rather than two records drifting apart.
Can I enter purchases as well as sales?
Yes, and on the paid plans you can enter them from a photograph of the supplier bill — supplier, GSTIN, lines and tax come back as a draft you check rather than a form you fill.
Will my CA be able to work with the data?
Yes. GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries plus CSV, Excel and JSON exports of customers, products, invoices and payments. That is what a practitioner actually wants — a clean file, not a 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.
See it working on your own bills
The fastest way to judge billing software is to bill with it. Photograph one supplier invoice, raise one sales invoice, and look at the PDF your customer would receive.
Open the software demo → — free account, no card, about a minute to set up.
More details on the home page → — what it does, what it costs, and where the limits are.
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