The khata, on your phone.

Parchi is the shopkeeper's book of who owes what. It does the job of the paper notebook under the counter: who took goods on credit, who paid, and what is still outstanding.

It works with no internet connection. Every feature is free, and the record stays on your phone.

Paper cannot argue its own case

A paper khata works until the day it doesn't, and it usually fails in one of three ways.

• It gets lost. Water, fire, a move, a page torn out. Years of who owes what, gone in an afternoon, with no copy anywhere.
• It gets disputed. The customer remembers three hundred. The book says five hundred. There is nothing between the two accounts but whose word carries further.
• It gets misremembered. An entry written in a hurry, a page skipped on a busy day, a number that could be a 1 or a 7. Months later nobody can tell which.

You gave, or you got

Every entry is one of two things: what you gave a customer, or what you got back. Parchi adds them up and tells you where the account stands, in words rather than a signed number.

It works with no network. Not "works offline too" - there is no server to reach. You can record a whole day of entries in a basement with no signal and nothing is waiting to be sent.

Every feature is free, with no paid tier. There is no account to create, no trial to expire, and no limit on how many customers or entries you record.

Two promises, and how to check them

Both of these are easy to say and worth nothing said alone, so here is what each one rests on.

Nothing you can do today moves behind a paywall later

This is not a pledge, because a pledge survives exactly as long as whoever made it. Two things hold it up instead.

• A check that fails the build. An automated check refuses any payment integration, subscription state, usage quota, or feature gate anywhere in the code. Adding a paywall means first deleting the check that forbids it - a visible, deliberate act, not a quiet feature.
• The licence. Parchi is under the AGPL-3.0, which requires modified versions, including ones run as a website, to stay available under the same terms. If a future maintainer changes their mind, the version that did not is still there.

It will not overstate how safe your record is

A record that exists only on one phone is one dropped phone from gone, and an app that implies otherwise is doing real harm. So Parchi states the plain position rather than a reassuring one.

The khata carries a backup mark. Until you have exported the book, it reads Not backed up. Once you have, it reads Backed up with the date. Record one more entry after that and it goes back to Not backed up, because the book has changed since the copy you hold.

Most apps measure how long ago you last backed up, which reports a book exported this morning and edited fifty times since as recently saved. That sentence is false in the way that costs someone money, so the mark compares the book against the copy instead of watching a clock.

Trying it

Not published yet. Parchi is not finished yet, and there is nothing to install today. This page describes what exists and what it does, not something you can download.

When there is a working build, the link to open it will be here. It will open in a phone browser, with no app store download and no account.