Your Kirana
The app that lets you organise your store.
A free billing & inventory app for small Indian grocery stores — record day-to-day transactions, manage stock, and run the shop through technology.
Project at a glance
Co-Founder & Product Designer — research through to UI
Owners of small grocery & kirana (corner) stores in India
Figma · barcode-scanner API with AI item lookup
7500+ product database, weekly/monthly sales reports, regular backups
What small shop owners actually deal with
We visited multiple small grocery and mom-and-pop stores directly to observe how they already run their shop.
90%
of small shops in India don’t use any kind of POS system.
30–40%
of small shop owners manage inventory in physical books.
60%
of small shop owners in India are aged 50 to 60+.
90%
of users cannot track their inventory and sales at all.
70%
felt tracking inventory & billing digitally would genuinely help.
Designing around K Mangesha
K Mangesha
Store Owner · 58 · Bangalore
Very hardworking, with over 30 years running his own store. Opens at 5:30 AM, seven days a week, without a break — all billing done by physical book, all calculations manual.
Pain points
- Manual calculations consume a lot of time.
- Physical books get damaged or torn eventually.
- No previous record of day-to-day transactions.
What he needs
- Track the movement of goods and products, easily.
- Record transactions in a way that’s usable later.
- Know the health of the business at a glance.
“Recently I lost the physical bill book — now I cannot track the inventory of the store, because all the stock inventory work is in that book.”
Discover, Define, Ideate, Design
- Discover
- Define
- Ideate
- Design
5 Why Analysis
Tracing "less business" and "zero scalability" back to their root cause.
Objectives & Goals
- Easily manage the storeThrough technology — and free to use.
- Organise the storeAn app that lets owners get on top of stock and billing.
Unique features
- Record, view, manageDay-to-day transactions and inventory, in one place.
- AI barcode scannerBuilt a barcode-scanner API using AI to identify items on scan.
- Large product databaseOwners don’t have to manually add every item themselves.
Where the gaps were
Vyapar
India’s biggest billing & inventory app for small businesses — can set up an online store through the app itself, but inventory and sales tracking stay largely manual.
Zoho Invoice
A solid online invoicing & billing app — but no barcode scanner, and it can’t track inventory at all.
Reflections
Design for the user in front of you
Most owners in this research were 50–60+ and had never used a POS — the product had to compete with a pen and a notebook, not with other apps.
Free removes the real barrier
Cost, not features, was the reason competitors like Vyapar and Zoho hadn’t already solved this for this audience.
One lost book is a strong enough reason
The clearest signal from research wasn’t a stat — it was one owner describing the day he lost his only inventory record.
Thank you for watching.
The app that lets you organise your store.