Walk into any jewellery shop in India on a working afternoon and you will see it within the hour: a customer slides a small pouch across the counter. Old bangles, a broken chain, a ring nobody wears any more. They want to exchange it against something new, or take cash for it. It is the most ordinary transaction on the floor. It is also the one most billing books handle worst.

The transaction everyone does and almost nobody documents

Old-gold exchange sits at the centre of the Indian jewellery trade, and yet most counter software still treats it as a discount field — a number you subtract from the new bill and then forget. That works right up until one of three things happens: your stock does not tie out, your GST filing throws a mismatch, or an officer asks how a kilogram of old metal moved through your books without a single voucher behind it. None of those are rare. All of them start with the same shortcut.

What actually happens at the counter

Strip away the software and an old-gold transaction has a fixed shape. Get the shape right first, and the software is just there to record it honestly.

Weigh the gross. Note the weight in front of the customer, on a scale they can see.
Test and grade. Touchstone, XRF, or karat meter — record the purity you actually assessed, not the purity the customer claims.
Deduct what is not gold. Stones, enamel, solder and dirt come off before you value the metal.
Agree the rate. Old gold is bought at your buying rate for that purity on that day, not the showroom selling rate.
Settle. Net the value against a new purchase or pay it out — and generate a voucher either way.

The GST question half the trade gets wrong

Here is the part that causes the most anxiety and the most bad advice. When an ordinary customer — someone not in the business of dealing in gold — sells you their old jewellery, you do not owe GST under reverse charge on that purchase. The CBIC clarified this back in 2017: an individual selling old ornaments is not doing so in the course or furtherance of business, so Section 9(4) does not apply. The moment the seller is an unregistered dealer rather than a walk-in customer, the position can flip and reverse charge may apply. Your books have to be able to tell those two situations apart, because the treatment is not the same.

The other half of the confusion is on the sell side. Taking in old metal does not reduce the GST you charge on the new piece. You still bill 3% on the gold value and 5% on the making charges of whatever the customer walks out with; the old gold is a separate inward transaction, not a discount on the outward one. Net the money if you like — do not net the tax.

A discount field cannot survive an audit. A purchase voucher can.

Books that survive a raid start at the counter

Every jeweller has heard a survey-or-search story. What separates the people who sleep fine from the people who do not is rarely the size of the stock — it is whether the paper explains the metal. Old gold is where that paper most often breaks, because it is inward stock with no supplier invoice attached. You have to create the evidence yourself, at the moment of the transaction, or it simply does not exist later.

The date, gross weight, assessed purity and net fine weight
A buying rate stamped from that day's rate, not typed in from memory
The customer's name and, above a sensible threshold, a KYC reference
A voucher number that ties the metal into your stock ledger as inward fine gold
A link to the new sale, if it was an exchange, so both legs reconcile

Where the familiar tools fall short

This is not a knock on the incumbents. Marg has run jewellery counters for decades and knows the trade inside out. Tally is the backbone of Indian accounting and will happily hold your ledgers. myBillBook is clean and cheap and gets a small shop billing in an afternoon. The trouble is that none of them were built around the old-gold problem specifically. In Tally, old gold becomes a journal entry someone remembers to pass later. In a general biller, it becomes that discount field. In a desktop tool, the record lives on one machine in one shop — which is a problem the day you open a second branch or a hard disk dies. Fair tools, real gaps.

Every gram that crosses the counter should leave a trail — inward and outward.

How BizRevolt treats old gold as inward stock, not a discount

We built the counter around the transaction described above. Old gold is captured as what it is — inward fine gold, weighed, graded, valued at the day's buying rate, and pushed straight into your metal ledger with a voucher behind it.

Rate-of-the-day buying prices per purity, so valuation is not a guess
Automatic net-fine-weight after deductions for stones and solder
A purchase voucher and stock-ledger entry generated at the moment of exchange
Correct GST on the new sale, with the old metal recorded separately and never netted against tax
One cloud ledger across every branch, so metal moving between shops still ties out

It is priced to be boring about it: ₹1,499 a month for a single counter, ₹3,999 for a growing shop, ₹7,999 for a multi-branch chain. No per-gram cut, no percentage of your turnover. If you want to see how your own old-gold flow would look, message me — I usually reply within about fifteen minutes on WhatsApp, or call the line at +91 91 0657 4865 and we will walk your counter through it.