Every jeweller runs one. Few run it cleanly.

The monthly gold savings scheme is the most reliable footfall machine a jewellery shop has. A customer commits to a fixed amount for eleven months, you add the twelfth, and they walk out with a piece they have effectively pre-paid. It builds loyalty, it smooths a famously lumpy cash flow, and it locks in a sale months before it happens. It is also, in the eyes of the Companies Act, something you have to handle with care — because the moment a savings scheme starts behaving like a deposit, you have wandered into territory that was never meant for a retail counter.

We build BizRevolt for jewellers, so we spend most of our time in the unglamorous corners of this trade: rate-of-the-day billing, old-gold exchange, karigar job-work, per-piece HUID stock. The savings scheme is one of those corners. It looks like marketing. It is actually compliance wearing a marketing costume.

The twelve-month line

Here is the rule in plain English. Under Rule 2(1)(c)(xii) of the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules, 2014, any advance you take from a customer against the future supply of goods is not treated as a ‘deposit’ — but only if you deliver those goods within 365 days of receiving the advance. Stay inside the year and you are collecting an advance, which is normal commerce. Cross that line — let the money sit for twelve months or more with no jewellery handed over — and the advance stops being an advance. It becomes a deposit.

That distinction is not academic. A company that is not a bank, an NBFC, or an eligible public company is simply not permitted to accept deposits from the public. So a scheme that matures in eleven or twelve months is clean. A scheme that quietly drifts to thirteen or eighteen months, or one where a customer finishes paying and then leaves the balance parked ‘for later,’ is the problem. This is precisely why the classic scheme is built as 11+1: eleven installments from the customer, one added by the shop, redeemed in the twelfth month. Stopping at twelve is not a gimmick. Twelve is the ceiling.

Why the rule exists at all

It helps to know why the line is drawn where it is. Unregulated public collection of money has a long and painful history in India, and the deposit rules are one of the fences built around it. When a jeweller collects a little from a few thousand customers every month, that is — structurally — public money sitting on your books. The 365-day delivery condition is the state’s way of saying: collect advances if you like, but they must convert into actual goods within a year, not sit as an open-ended IOU. Read that way, the rule is not hostile to your scheme. It is a definition of when your scheme is still a scheme.

What your books have to be able to show

The compliance is not really about running the scheme. It is about whether your records can prove, customer by customer, that every rupee you collected was an advance against goods delivered inside twelve months. If an officer, an auditor, or your own CA asks that question, the answer has to be in the system, not in someone’s memory. Concretely, that means:

The date each installment was received, per customer, so the 365-day clock is visible and auditable — not reconstructed later from receipt books.
The maturity date of every enrolment, flagged before it crosses twelve months, so a drifting scheme is caught while you can still act.
A clean link from advance to redemption: which piece, which bill, which HUID, closed which enrolment.
GST recognised at the right moment — advances collected for goods are not taxed on receipt; GST applies when the jewellery is actually supplied at redemption.
The bonus installment you contribute recorded as a scheme cost, not left floating as an unexplained credit.

And when the customer finally redeems, you are making an ordinary sale — which means, since 1 April 2023, the piece you hand over must carry the six-digit alphanumeric HUID, hallmarked, like everything else on your counter. The scheme buys the customer a discount and a habit. It does not exempt you from a single one of the counter’s normal disciplines. It just adds a clock to each one.

Every enrolment is a promise with a deadline attached — and the deadline is 365 days.

Where a notebook quietly fails you

Most schemes in this country still live in a register or a spreadsheet, and the failure mode there is almost never fraud. It is drift. A customer misses two months and asks to extend. Another pauses in a bad month and resumes later. A second branch keeps its own parallel book. None of it is dishonest, and all of it nudges enrolments past the twelve-month line without anyone ever deciding to cross it. By the time you notice, the one clean sentence you wanted — ‘every advance became goods within a year’ — is no longer something you can prove. You can only hope.

The scheme that builds loyalty can also build a liability you can’t see until it’s late.

Where the usual tools stop

To be fair to the incumbents: Marg, Tally, myBillBook, and the local desktop billing tools every jeweller has tried are genuinely good at what they were built for — invoicing, stock registers, GST returns. But a savings scheme is not an invoice. It is a rolling, per-customer liability with a statutory deadline, and most of these tools treat it as a side-ledger you maintain by hand. Tally will hold the accounting entry; it will not warn you that a specific enrolment crosses 365 days next Tuesday. Marg will bill the redemption; it will not tie that bill back to the eleven receipts that funded it. The gap is not competence. It is that the scheme was never a first-class object in tools designed around the invoice.

How we built it instead

In BizRevolt, an enrolment is its own object with its own clock. You see every customer’s installments, the maturity date, and an alert before — not after — the twelve-month line. Redemption closes the enrolment, pulls the HUID-tagged piece from stock, prices it at the rate of the day, and produces a GST-correct bill that is permanently linked to the advances that paid for it. Old-gold exchange, karigar job-work, and multi-branch transfers sit in the same system, on one audit trail, so a raid or an audit meets a straight answer instead of four disconnected registers. It is not a bolt-on to billing. It is the part of the business the billing tools left for you to hold by hand.

You can start on the Counter plan at ₹1,499 a month, move to Growth at ₹3,999 or Chain at ₹7,999 as you add branches, and — honestly — the right way to buy this is to run it against your own live schemes first. If that is what you want, message us on WhatsApp or call +91 91 0657 4865 and we will walk your actual book with you, drift and all, before you decide anything.