The register, Excel, and MicroCylo.
Is Excel enough to run a gas agency?
For a small round that sells for cash and keeps no credit, yes: a sheet with a date, a name and an amount is enough, and buying software would be a waste. Excel stops being enough the moment you carry a khata. It will hold the numbers, but it will not stop a sale over a credit limit, it will not count the shells each customer is holding, it will not print a statement on your letterhead, and two people cannot keep the same sheet open at the counter without one of them overwriting the other.
The three, point by point.
| Capability | Paper register | Excel sheet | MicroCylo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Running balance per customer | Yes, once somebody adds it up | Yes, with a formula per customer | Kept automatically on every entry |
| Credit limit stops the sale | No | No | Checked at the till, before the bill |
| Empties held, per customer | In total, in practice | Only if a second sheet is kept | Counted out and in, per account |
| Invoice on your letterhead | A pre-printed book | A template, retyped each time | Your name, logo and tax number, printed |
| Statement for any date range | Copied out by hand | Filtered by hand | Two dates, then print or PDF |
| Two people working at once | One book, one pair of hands | One of them overwrites the other | Up to four machines on one book |
| What you charged last year | Whatever was written down | Lost when the price cell is changed | Every line keeps the price it sold at |
| Money sitting at the plant | Worked out on request | Only if somebody maintains it | In rupees and in cylinders, on screen |
| Works with the internet down | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| What it costs | A register, and the hours | A licence you probably have | Rs 45,000 or Rs 85,000, once |
When should you not buy this?
If your whole round is cash, if nobody owes you anything at the end of the day, and if you have never had to argue about how many cylinders somebody is holding, then your register is doing its job and software would only add a step. The case for MicroCylo starts with credit and with shells.
The words this trade uses
- Khata
- A khata is the running account a gas agency keeps for one customer: what he took, what he was billed, what he has paid, and what he still owes. On paper it is a page or a spread in a register. In MicroCylo it is a screen with an opening balance, every entry in date order, and a closing balance, for whatever two dates you ask for.
- Empties, or shells
- An empty is the cylinder itself once the gas is gone. It belongs to the agency, not to the customer, so a depot needs to know how many shells each customer is holding at any moment. Counting them only in total is how a yard slowly loses cylinders.
- Plant rate
- The plant rate is the price per cylinder a gas agency fixes with the gas company when it pays money to the plant in advance. It is what turns a rupee balance at the plant into a cylinder count: twelve lac advanced at a fixed rate of Rs 1,150 is 1,043 cylinders still to collect.
More questions on this
Can MicroCylo import my existing Excel sheet?
Yes. We bring across the opening balance for each account, the empties they are holding, and your catalogue with prices and deposits. Old bills can be loaded too if you have them in a sheet.
Can I still get my data out into Excel afterwards?
Yes, at any time. Every report exports to PDF or Excel, and the backup is a zip of plain comma separated text that opens in any spreadsheet, even if the application never starts again.
Is this cloud software?
No. It installs on your own computer and keeps your books there. It needs no internet to run, and nothing sits on somebody else's server.
Half an hour, on your own figures.
Send us a page of your register or a month of your Excel and we'll load it before the call, so what you see is your depot and not a demo one.
+92 334 852 0320 · sales@microcylo.com · Sahiwal, Pakistan