Milk Register

A milk ledger for the Indian dairy trade.

A vendor delivers twice a day, a buyer takes from several vendors, rates change mid-month, and payments arrive in uneven lumps. Milk Register keeps that account straight and lets either side send the other a statement on WhatsApp.

WHAT IT KEEPS

• Parties and rates — vendors you buy from and clients you sell to. Change a rate from a date, and earlier entries keep the rate they were billed at.
• Entries by session — morning and evening, cow or buffalo, as a list or a month calendar with litres and value on every day.
• Payments that settle — money in either direction, applied to the oldest unpaid entries as far as it reaches.
• Reports and Excel — purchases and sales by volume and value, what you owe against what is owed to you, a per-party ledger and a month-by-month breakdown, exportable as a real .xlsx workbook.
• WhatsApp statements — an entry receipt, a payment receipt or a full account. Every message goes from your own WhatsApp.
• Reminders that learn — the app reads your last three weeks and works out which rounds you actually keep, then speaks up only when one is missing.

A RATE IS A DATE, NOT A SETTING

If the rate is a number stored on the vendor, raising it today silently reprices every entry you ever made, and a month you already settled stops adding up. Here a rate is a dated row: an entry is priced from the rate that applied on the entry's own date. Correct last week's litres and it stays at last week's price.

YOUR BOOK STAYS YOURS

Your account and your ledger, and nothing else. Not sold, not shared, not used for advertising. No advertising in the app and no tracking service in it. Your phone book is read only when you tap the button that fills a vendor's number, and only the contact you pick. How messages leave your phone is described below.

SENDING ON WHATSAPP, AND THE ACCESSIBILITY SERVICE

By default nothing is sent on your behalf: WhatsApp opens with the message already typed and the send is yours to press.

There is one optional setting, "Send automatically", which is off unless you turn it on. With it on, Milk Register uses Android's accessibility service to press send in WhatsApp for you and return to the app. While that setting is on, the service can read what is on the screen inside WhatsApp. It uses this only to find the send button for the message you just chose to share, and only in the few seconds after you tap share. It never runs in any other app, nothing it reads is stored or sent anywhere, and you can turn it off in Android's settings or in the app at any time. Before the setting can be switched on, the app explains all of this and asks you to agree.

Free. There is also a web panel at milkregister.com for the same ledger in a browser.