A regular customer wants to show a necklace to her mother before she decides. A wedding party asks for six sets to try at home. An exhibition in the next city needs forty pieces for three days. In each case gold leaves your showcase without a sale — 'on approval', on a jangad slip. It is one of the oldest habits in the trade, and it is also where a shocking amount of stock and tax discipline quietly falls apart. This is a plain look at how to do it properly.

We build software for jewellers, so we see the jangad book up close. The paper version works right up until the day it doesn't — a piece not returned, a slip that went missing, a branch that swears it sent back everything. Let us walk through what 'on approval' actually is, the GST clock most shops don't know is ticking, and how to keep the whole thing accountable.

What 'on approval' really is

When you send goods on approval, you have not sold anything yet. Ownership has not moved. What you have done is remove stock from your premises on the understanding that the recipient will either buy it or return it. That means two things must be true at once: the piece has to remain fully accounted for in your inventory as your gold, and there must be a document that legitimately explains why it left the building without a bill. Get either wrong and you have a gram of gold that is neither in your showcase nor on an invoice — which is exactly the gap an assessment officer is trained to find.

The six-month clock most shops don't know is running

Here is the part that surprises people. Goods sent on approval move out on a delivery challan, not a tax invoice, and you do not charge GST at the moment they leave — an e-way bill applies where the value crosses the threshold. So far, so familiar. What many jewellers miss is Section 31(7) of the CGST Act: when goods are sent on approval, the tax invoice must be issued either when the buyer approves the sale, or within six months of the date the goods were removed, whichever is earlier. That six-month limit is absolute. It cannot be stretched by a friendly agreement to keep the pieces out longer. If a customer or an exhibition holds your goods past six months without buying or returning them, the law treats it as a supply and GST becomes payable — by you — whether or not any money has changed hands.

So a jangad that is not tracked is not just an inventory risk. It is a tax liability with a timer on it. If you cannot see, today, which pieces have been out for how long, you cannot know which ones are about to trip that clock.

What a clean on-approval record must capture

Every piece out on approval, by HUID and weight, tagged to who holds it and since when.
The delivery challan that authorised the movement, and the e-way bill where the value requires one.
A running age for each item, so the six-month clock is visible before it strikes, not after.
The outcome of each slip: bought (raise the tax invoice), returned (back into stock), or still out.
Reconciliation of the whole jangad — gross weight out equals weight sold plus weight returned plus weight still on approval, to the gram.
A user-and-time stamp on every leg, so months later you can prove where any piece was on any date.

Where the register and the desktop tools leave you

The paper jangad book is honest work, and plenty of shops have run on it for decades — no criticism there. Marg and the older desktop packages bill well and some handle approval memos. Tally keeps the accounts impeccably. But none of them, on their own, gives you a live, weight-level view of what is out, how old it is, and what it means for GST. On a desktop tool the approval leg is often a note in the margin, disconnected from stock and from the tax clock. The register lives in one book at one counter. The moment your business is busy enough to have pieces out with several customers and a branch or two, 'which gold is where, and for how long' becomes a question nobody can answer quickly — and that is the day the discipline breaks.

An untracked jangad is not just missing stock. It is a GST liability with a six-month timer you cannot see.

Branch-to-branch is the same problem wearing a different coat

Moving stock between your own branches is on-approval's close cousin. A piece sent from the main showroom to a smaller outlet for a customer is still your gold, still needs a document to move, and still has to reconcile at both ends. Multi-branch shops leak most at exactly this seam: a transfer that one branch recorded as 'sent' and the other never recorded as 'received', so the same necklace is either double-counted or missing depending on which register you believe. A single stock ledger that both branches write to — rather than two books that have to be married up at month-end — is the only thing that closes that gap.

Pieces out with customers, at an exhibition, at another branch — all still your gold, all on a clock.

How BizRevolt handles jangad and transfers

We treat on-approval as a first-class movement, not a footnote. A piece going out on approval leaves against a delivery challan, stays in your inventory tagged 'on approval' with the holder and the date, and starts a visible age counter. When the customer buys, the tax invoice is one tap away and the piece converts cleanly; when it comes back, it returns to stock with its HUID intact. Nothing sits in limbo, and the six-month clock is on screen long before it matters. Branch transfers write to one shared stock ledger, so 'sent' and 'received' are two ends of the same record, not two books to reconcile. That is the raid-proof audit trail we keep going on about — not a slogan, just the ability to account for every gram, on any date, without a knot in your stomach.

It runs in the cloud, so every counter and branch sees the same live stock. BizRevolt for jewellers is ₹1,499 a month for a single Counter, ₹3,999 for Growth, and ₹7,999 for a multi-branch Chain, with rate-of-the-day, weight-priced POS, HUID-tagged stock, on-approval and branch transfers, old-gold exchange, gold schemes and karigar job-work all in one place.

If you run a counter and your jangad book gives you a small monthly heart attack, we would rather show you than tell you. Message us, or call and talk to a human on +91 91 0657 4865 — we answer, and we know what a jangad slip is. We are building this in the open, jeweller by jeweller, and honest feedback about where we are still wrong is worth more to us than a polite nod.