- This innovation empowers the shopkeeper
- Makes the conventional calculator redundant
Hyderabad, September 26th, 2022; Tohands Pvt Ltd., a start-up initiative of four enthusiastic entrepreneurs to provide smart transaction tallying solutions for small and medium businesses, has unveiled the easy to use, world’s first smart calculator device, Tohands Smart Calculator. This intelligent calculator helps shopkeepers to keep track of their instore transactions, including income and expenses during a specific period through the Tohands App on the mobile. This device spares the shopkeeper the hassle of jotting down all the income and expenses made during the day and presents an updated statement at the click of a button. Tohands Pvt Ltd., is supported by Startup India Seed fund and T-hub; for developing the Smart Calculator and has raised through them Rs 50 Lakhs till date.
The Tohands Smart Calculator was formally launched by the Chief Guest Mr Jayesh Ranjan, Secretary, IT, Government of Telangana; at T- Hub Phase 2; today. Mr Srinivas Rao, CEO, T-Hub; Ms Shanta Thoutam, CIO, TSIC; graced the occasion. The four young innovators from Tohands Pvt Ltd., Praveen Mishra, Founder Chief Everything officer; Satyam Sahu, All things Tech; Shanmugha Vadivel, Chief Hardware officer and Arvind Subramanian, All things growth.
The rudimentary accounting system followed by the SMBs even today, despite its set of flaws, makes their life difficult and also impacts the overall customer experience. Studies indicate, 91% of the small and unorganized shopkeepers in India tend to use pen and paper for bookkeeping and don’t rely on the available options like POS or other billing systems, despite their helpful features. The increased number of payment options such as Cash, Card, UPI, etc., have further aggravated the challenge and it becomes difficult to keep a tab on the total revenue they generated in a day, week or month.
Speaking on the occasion Mr Jayesh Ranjan said, congratulate Praveen and his colleagues for this amazing product. We know that the pace of digitalisation is enormous but we don’t associate MSMEs owners, small traders as being very conversant with digital world. In fact these could be the last people to get into the digital bandwagon. But we also had very different kind of experiences with these stake holder groups. I would like to share something which happened in Telangana two years ago. We recall that the first lockdown happened in March 2020, it was a harsh lockdown because of the suddenness. After a couple of days people realised that you can’t just do away with sourcing of groceries, essentials and that’s when stores were permitted to deliver based on online orders. Which provided relief to the citizens. In cities with traditional culture, there are provision stores called kirana stores, which you and your family would have patronised for generations, have a friendly relationship with the store owner and he extends credit. Obviously when e-commerce and online ordering became a practice for consumer, one really felt bad about such small traders, who don’t have online presence, they can’t deliver and they are not large stores. We with the help of some partner organisations tried something unique which today is recognised as one of the best practices across the country. We decided to convert thousand kirana stores into digital stores. Most of them are not tech savvy, educated, old fashion style operators, whom we can’t anticipate to do the latest, but with the help of their associations, we were able to get thousands of them onboard and with the help of a technology provider, literally overnight we educated them on how to store inventory online, created a payment gateway, they just had to employ couple of delivery boys and literally thousands of them became digital and were able to service their customers. This is a way to show that when circumstances demand we can push them to break that barrier. In that context Tohands Smart Calculator is a simple calculator, but has potential of doing the basic accounting which a small trader or a SME company owner will be at ease with. Also from pricing point it is very competitive. But what is heartening is that everything in that device is designed and manufactured in India, very unusual for a hardware product. Most of the time hardware products are manufactured in China, Philippines, though Indian companies brand and circulate them, there is very little that is Indian in it. So this is an exception, it is a fact that it looks sleek and aesthetic and is user friendly for the set of people it is targeted to. Happy that T-Hub start-ups are solving real world problems in a very focused manner. I hope this kind of innovation mindset sets in on how you create hardware products also. While ideas of this kind are getting seeded in the T-Hub and the other incubators and accelerators that we have in the city, but it’s just a matter of couple of months when T-Works will be the centre which will provide lot of encouragement for people who are into hardware, once its inaugurated you will all see what kind of machinery and equipment is made available and more importantly the kind of support and guidance you get from domain experts to protype and test your designs. Hopefully as we celebrate the product from Tohands, there will be literally dozens of such innovations that solve many more real world challenges stakeholders face. We look froward to the successful rollout of Tohands Smart Calculator and will help you in connecting with the associations. We will arrange demos of the product in MSME estates in the state.
Mr Srinivas Rao, said, what you guys could do in a such a short span is fabulous. This will become a textbook case, you found a problem, thought of an innovative solution and you actually built it. About 90% of all FMCG sale happens through kirana stores and you built a solution at 6% to 7% of what a normal POS machine costs and giving as much functionality, which is fabulous. Some suggestions I have is to think of different languages support, because most of India is not English savvy, think about voice support.
The current options of SMBs are not user friendly. Keeping track of all the transactions and recording the income and expense in a note book is laborious and not foolproof too. Using an app to record every transaction is time consuming and distracts attention from the customer. Our Tohands Smart Calculator precisely addresses these day to day challenges. It records every transaction on the mobile app in real time and the shopkeeper can access it at his convenience, thus helping him to place his thrust on customer servicing and win their loyalty, says Praveen Mishra.
Tohands Smart Calculator brings in the much needed transparency in bookkeeping among small and medium businesses, while recording and displaying accurate income and expenses details at any point of time. This smart calculator with a convenient alpha numeric keyboard, lasts for three days on a power recharge. It has an Internal memory to record up to five Lakh transactions and saves the details even if the device is not connected to WIFI. The made in India highly affordable Tohands Smart Calculator at just Rs 2999/-, comes with a one year warranty. The App which comes with the device is Freemium and users can access the data of the last 90 days from it and download a few reports. A monthly subscription starting at Rs 99, enables data access and download of reports of more than 90 days.
Small shopkeepers juggle their time on a daily basis between customer servicing and recording the transactions. The innovative solution Tohands Smart Calculator offers, facilitates all this at a fraction of the cost of an ordinary calculator or billing machine and provides immense relief to the shopkeeper, says Pravin Mishra.
Tohands Smart Calculator is easy to adopt for shopkeepers as they are already familiar with the conventional calculators. A click of the Cash-In button records the sale and Cash-Out button records the payments. It also facilitates the owner to keep track of the transactions in his absence at the store, with the real time inputs through the Tohands Mobile app on his mobile device.
The design ideology of the company is MAYA – More advance Yet Acceptable. Tohands Smart Calculator brings in the new solution within the current behaviour pattern. This enables the user of the smart calculator to embrace the change quickly with no resistance, says Praveen Mishra.
Tohands Smart Calculator is all set to disrupt the calculator market dominated by Casio and other Chinese vendors with practically no innovation in the product for the last two decades, says Mr Jayesh Ranjan.
