Selling on instalments is easy to promise and hard to keep track of. The sale happens once; the collecting happens twelve or twenty-four times, each with its own due date, its own share of interest, and its own chance of arriving late. Most businesses end up running it on a spreadsheet beside their accounts — which works until the two disagree.
TamilAccounting's Instalment Sales app keeps the whole arrangement inside the books. You install it, design the schemes you want to offer, and from then on a plan is just another way of making a sale.
A scheme is the product you are selling
Before any customer is involved you describe what you are willing to offer: how often an instalment falls due, which tenures a customer may pick, whether interest is flat or on the reducing balance, the rate, the minimum down payment, and any processing fee.
Then the rules that save the arguments later — a late fee and its ceiling, days of grace, a foreclosure charge, a lock-in period before anyone may pre-close, whether early payers get back the interest not yet earned, which item categories qualify, and the dates the scheme itself is valid between. Set once, applied every time.
A worked example
A customer buys goods for 60,000, puts down 10,000, and takes a twelve-month plan at 12% flat with a 1% processing fee.
| Element | Amount |
|---|---|
| Goods | 60,000 |
| Down payment today | 10,000 |
| Financed | 50,000 |
| Finance charge (12% flat, 1 year) | 6,000 |
| Processing fee (1%) | 500 |
| Payable over 12 instalments | 56,000 |
| Monthly instalment | 4,667 |
The sale is one sales invoice for the goods, the finance charge and the fee. What the app adds is a schedule of twelve dated instalments against it — and those instalments, not the invoice total, are what the customer's aging, the reminders and the portal all work from.
Interest you earn, not interest you claim
The 6,000 of interest in that example has not been earned on day one. Point the finance charge at an unearned finance income account and the app holds it there, then moves one instalment's worth into income each month as it falls due. A single month-end run does it, posted and traceable.
It matters at both ends. Your monthly profit stops jumping every time you write a plan, and if a customer pre-closes in month five, the interest for months six to twelve is still sitting in unearned income — which is exactly what lets you hand it back cleanly.
Collecting
Collection is one screen: what the customer paid, where it went, on what date. It allocates against the oldest instalments first and bills any late fee that has accrued. Late fees come from the scheme's rule rather than from someone's judgement, and a fee you decide to forgive is waived with a reason recorded against the plan.
Reminders go out before the due date, on it, and after it — by email, by WhatsApp, or into the customer's portal, each carrying a link to pay online. Customers who can pay themselves generally do.
When the plan changes
Plans rarely run exactly as written. You can pre-close one and rebate the unearned interest, reschedule it, write off a balance that is not coming, or cancel it altogether — which turns it back into an ordinary sales invoice rather than leaving a half-dead plan behind. Every one of those is recorded against the plan, so a year later you can still see what happened and who did it.
What the customer walks out with
Each plan prints two documents of its own: an agreement setting out the schedule and the terms, and an EMI card the customer keeps to track what they have paid. Both come off the plan screen, which also carries every action in one place — collect, pre-close, reschedule, waive a late fee, write off, add a note, send a reminder.
Where you watch it from
An overview screen shows the portfolio: financed, outstanding, overdue, collected. A due list shows whose instalment is next and who is chasing it. A customer's own page carries their plans. The till can sell on instalments through the same schemes, and six reports cover the register of plans, what is due, the aging of what is late, collections, the portfolio and the finance income earned.
Who this is for
Anyone whose customers pay over time: consumer electronics and appliance dealers, furniture and two-wheeler showrooms, jewellers running saving and purchase schemes, equipment sellers, education and service providers billing in parts. If you are currently doing this on a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is the thing this replaces.
