Born behind the counter

I grew up behind the counter of our family clothing business, surrounded by ledgers, cheques, stock and handwritten records. In time I was not only surrounded by that paperwork — I was doing it, by hand.

That was my first accounting system. It worked. It still works.

The shop is older than my memory

Trishakti Stores has been open in Narayangarh since 1991. Readymade garments, wholesale and retail. Over the years it has built a network reaching around 750 active retail shops across Mid-Nepal as of 2026, which sounds like a statistic until you think about what it means: relationships, each with its own payment habits, its own good months and bad months, and much of it living in somebody’s head as much as in any book.

I don’t have a memory that predates that shop. There was no day I decided to enter the family business. I was in it the way a child is in a language — commerce was the vocabulary around me long before I had words for any of it.

Promises, written into books

The real business was never the cash. Cash is easy. The real business was udhaaro — credit, promises.

Goods go out today and payment comes later. That is not a loan agreement. It is a line in a book and a shared understanding that both sides remember it the same way — and when the two sides remember it differently, that is where the evening goes.

Growing up around that teaches you something no accounting textbook says out loud: a ledger is not a record of money. It is a record of what people said they would do. The money is the part that shows up later, if the ledger was honest.

When my father travels

My father travels for buying. When he does, the whole workload lands on me. Not a piece of it. All of it.

The counter, the phone, the party who wants one more month, the cheque that has to be deposited on time, the payment that came in and has to be matched against old bills instead of the new one. And underneath all of it, the running question of whether we can pay what we owe this week.

Those stretches taught me more than any semester did. When there is nobody above you to check the work, you find out exactly how much of your system was actually a system and how much of it was your father’s memory.

What school gave names to

I passed my BBS in accounting from Tribhuvan University in October 2025. People assume the degree came first and the shop second. It was the other way around.

University gave names to things my hands already did. Double entry was a formal way of saying what the shop had taught me by embarrassment: every movement has two sides, and if you only write one of them, the difference will come and find you at the worst possible time. Depreciation, accruals, closing stock. I had been living inside those ideas without vocabulary for them.

The degree did not teach me commerce. It taught me the words for what I already knew, which turned out to be useful, because you cannot build software for a thing you cannot name.

What the shop taught me about building things

Two habits came out of that and went straight into how I build software.

The boring parts are the business. Inventory, records, who owes what — none of it is interesting, and all of it is where a shop lives or dies. Software is no different. The thing that matters is the data you can trust and the reports nobody demos but everyone depends on.

Working beats clever. A customer does not care how a system is built. They care whether it does the thing. That is the standard I try to hold to, and it is why I would rather ship something plain and correct than something impressive and approximate.

The question that started everything

Here is where it turns.

My brother built Scan ERP to run the workflow inside our own garment operation, and watching other manufacturers start asking for it broke something open in me. Not because the tool was impressive. Because it was possible. Somebody in our family had simply decided that the way we were doing a thing could be a different thing, and then made it so.

After that I could not stop noticing the friction. Records that exist in one place and nowhere else. Reconciliation that eats an evening because a payment was posted against the wrong bill. The owner who has to hand the books to one trusted person and then simply hope, because there is no way to see what was entered without asking the person who entered it.

Every one of those is a small thing. Together they are why a business that everyone in the family understands completely still cannot answer a simple question quickly.

So that is the question I have been chasing since, and I am still building toward the answer, not selling one:

The day’s work is known as it happens. Why should it take until the end of the month to find out what it meant?