A woman walks into your showroom with a 22-gram chain she has worn for fifteen years. She wants a 30-gram necklace. Your salesman weighs the old chain, touches it, calls out a purity, deducts something for solder and stones, quotes a rate, and writes four numbers on a slip. Ten minutes later a bill is printed. Everyone is happy.
That slip is the single most under-engineered document in Indian jewellery retail. It is where your stock ledger, your GST position and — if a survey team ever walks in — your credibility all get decided. And in most shops it is a piece of paper in a drawer.
Exchange is two transactions, not one
The instinct at the counter is to treat exchange as a discount: 30 grams out, 22 grams in, charge the customer for the difference. Commercially that is exactly what is happening. For your books, it is not one netted-off sale. It is two supplies sitting back to back.
- You buy old gold from the customer. If she is an ordinary individual and not in the business of dealing in gold, this purchase does not put you under reverse charge — CBIC clarified that Section 9(4) is not triggered by a private person selling their own old jewellery.
- You sell new jewellery to the customer. GST is charged on the full value of the new piece — all 30 grams plus making — not on the net amount she pays after the old gold is set off. The mode of consideration (cash, card, or metal) does not shrink the value of your supply.
- What you then do with the old chain matters. Sell it onward as-is, and second-hand goods valuation under Rule 32(5) can apply — GST on your margin. Melt it, refine it, and you have changed the nature of the goods; the margin scheme reasoning no longer holds.
None of this is exotic. It is the standard reading in the trade's own GST FAQs. But it only works if the two legs exist separately in your system — a purchase document for the old gold, a tax invoice for the new piece. If your software only knows how to print a bill with a line item called 'less: old gold', you have not recorded a purchase. You have recorded a discount. Those are very different things when someone asks where 22 grams of metal came from.
What the old-gold voucher has to capture
Treat it like what it is: an inward purchase of a precious commodity from an unregistered person. If it cannot stand on its own two years later, it is not a voucher, it is a note.
- Customer name, address, and a phone number, with an ID reference for higher-value purchases
- Gross weight, deductions (stones, solder, wastage), and net weight — recorded separately, not collapsed into one figure
- Purity as tested, and how it was tested (touchstone, XRF machine reading)
- The rate applied on that date, and a timestamp — because your rate moves during the day
- Value paid, and how: cash, adjustment against a new sale, or bank transfer
- A photograph of the piece, and where it went next — as-is resale stock, or the melting lot
- A signature. Physical or digital, but a signature.
The last line matters more than it sounds. A shop that can produce a signed, timestamped, photographed purchase record for every gram of old metal has an answer for every question. A shop that cannot is arguing from memory.
Hallmarking pulls the same thread
You can buy old, unhallmarked jewellery back from a customer — that has never been in doubt. What you cannot do is put someone else's un-HUID'd chain back in the showcase and sell it as-is. Since the Mandatory Hallmarking Order amendments of March 2023, sale of hallmarked gold jewellery without the six-digit HUID is prohibited, and old pieces you intend to resell have to be re-hallmarked first. Silver moved onto the HUID system in September 2025, and hallmarking has been extended to additional caratages including 9K. The direction of travel is obvious: every piece that leaves your counter will eventually need a traceable identity.
Which means your old-gold decision is not just a valuation decision. It is a routing decision — melt it, or send it for re-hallmarking — and your system should ask that question at the counter, not three weeks later when someone notices the piece sitting in the tray.
Why the usual tools make this hard
I want to be fair here, because the incumbents are not bad software. They are software built for a different shape of problem.
- Tally is an excellent accounting ledger. It was never designed for weight-priced inventory, rate-of-the-day pricing, purity deductions or HUID-tagged pieces. Jewellers make it work with custom TDLs and a lot of discipline, and it does work — until the person who understood the customisation leaves.
- Marg has real jewellery depth and a large installed base. It is also, for most shops, still a desktop product: the data lives on one machine in the shop, and multi-branch or on-the-road access is an add-on rather than the default.
- myBillBook and the general GST billing apps are fast, cheap and genuinely useful for a kirana or a hardware store. They price by item, not by gram, and they have no opinion about old gold at all.
- The local desktop tool built by a friend of the family is free until it is not — until the laptop dies, or the developer stops picking up, or the data cannot be exported into anything.
The question is not whether your software can print a bill. It is whether it can tell you, without a phone call, where 22 grams of someone else's chain went.
What we built instead
BizRevolt's jewellery workspace treats exchange as a first-class transaction, not a discount field. You start the sale, pull in the old-gold purchase inside the same flow, and the system creates both legs: a purchase voucher against the customer, and a tax invoice for the new piece valued in full. Purity, deductions, the day's rate at the moment of the transaction, the photograph, the routing decision — all captured at the counter, in the thirty seconds when the person is standing in front of you and not a minute later.
Everything downstream comes for free: your metal position reconciles, your melting lot has a documented origin, your HUID-tagged pieces stay separate from your scrap, and a request for records is a report, not a weekend.
Pricing is deliberately boring: ₹1,499 a month for a single counter, ₹3,999 for Growth, ₹7,999 for a chain with multiple branches and inter-branch transfers. Cloud, so the data is not hostage to one machine. No implementation project, no consultant.
We are building this in the open, alongside jewellers who tell us where it hurts. If exchange is the transaction that eats your evenings, I would like to hear how you handle it today — the workarounds are usually smarter than the software. Message me on WhatsApp, or call the team on +91 91 0657 4865, and we will show you the exchange flow end to end in about ten minutes.
Image credit: Jlgoldpalace, CC BY-SA 4.0, and Rajmishra757, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.