If your salesmen still write orders in a notebook, read them out on the phone, or send photos of handwritten lists on WhatsApp, an order booking app is the most obvious upgrade you can make. Orders arrive faster, are typed once instead of twice, and stop getting lost between the shop and the godown.
But order booking apps vary enormously. Some are little more than a digital notebook. Others connect the order to stock, pricing, credit and delivery. Here is what to check before you choose.
The 12-point checklist
Working in the market
1. It works offline. The order must be saved on the phone without signal and sent automatically later. Ask to see it work in aeroplane mode. See selling in low-network areas.
2. It is fast at the counter. A salesman has a minute or two per outlet. Search by product name or code, quick quantity entry, reorder from the last order.
3. It shows the customer's own prices. Not a list price the office corrects later — the price this outlet actually pays.
4. It shows stock. Booking what the distributor cannot deliver creates a failed delivery tomorrow.
5. It shows outstanding. What the outlet owes, and how old it is — the cue to collect. See retailer credit.
6. It records collections too, against the customer and the bills paid.
For the office
7. Orders arrive structured, ready to review and fulfil — not as text someone re-types.
8. Every order has an owner and a time, so you know who booked it and when.
9. Visits are recorded, including visits with no order, so coverage and productive calls can be measured. See beat planning.
10. Orders flow on — to dispatch, delivery, invoicing — without another system in between.
For the business
11. Permissions are real. Salesmen should see their customers, not every customer; only some people should be able to change prices.
12. It hands over to accounts. If your books are in TallyPrime or BUSY, the day's records should reach them without retyping.
A quick test during the demo
Ask the vendor to do this, live:
- Turn on aeroplane mode, book an order for a real customer with five lines.
- Show the customer's outstanding while doing it.
- Turn the network back on and show the order arriving in the office.
- Change one line in the office, and show who changed it.
If any step needs a workaround, you have learned something important.
What it costs to keep doing it by hand
A typical distributor receiving 120 handwritten or WhatsApp orders a day, at 4 minutes to re-type each, spends 8 hours a day on data entry — one full person — before counting the errors. If 2% of order lines are entered wrong, and each wrong line costs a return trip or a short delivery, those errors usually cost more than the person typing. Use the calculator below with your own numbers.
How Zaqnet does order booking
- GroundLink is the field app: orders, collections and visits recorded at the outlet, online or offline, synced when the connection returns.
- Customers, prices and stock come from the same records the office uses in ControlRoom.
- Orders arrive in ControlRoom ready to review, fulfil and dispatch — alongside orders from modern trade POs and the customer portal.
- Permissions decide what each person can see and do — including who may change a price on an order line.
- Day-end closes the day's orders and collections, and AutoSync passes supported records to TallyPrime or BUSY.
Choose the app your slowest salesman can use at the busiest counter, with no signal. Everything else is easier.