Billing software for Mumbai's counters.

Most of Mumbai's wholesale food trade now sits across the harbour in Navi Mumbai. Crawford Market, officially Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai, was completed in 1869 and was the city's main wholesale fruit market until March 1996, when its wholesale traders were moved to Navi Mumbai. The building, just north of CSMT and opposite the police headquarters, still sells fruit, vegetables and poultry alongside clothes, toys and household goods.

The Mumbai APMC now runs a cluster of separate markets, each for one kind of produce. Onions, potatoes and garlic trade at the Onion-Potato Market in Sector 18, Vashi. Rice, wheat and pulses go through the Grain Market in Sector 19, Vashi, and the Spice Market next to it handles spices, sugar, jaggery and dry fruits. Vegetables and fruit have their own markets at Turbhe. Back in South Mumbai, the streets around Masjid station are still full of wholesale stockists, with the iron market, Lokhand Bazaar, on one side. A grocery shop in the suburbs may restock staples through Vashi, spices through a stockist and packaged goods through a distributor, all in the same week.

Space is the usual pressure behind a Mumbai counter. In many shops the shelf is small and much of the stock waits in a loft, a back room or a rented godown. Bazaar IQ counts display stock and storage stock separately for each product, so the owner can see when the shelf is running low while the loft is still full, and the reverse. Purchases from Vashi or a stockist go into storage first. If the shop keeps a second branch, each branch has its own stock and goods can be transferred between them on record.

The counter also has to handle language. In the 2011 census, Marathi was the most spoken language in Mumbai at 35.4 percent, followed by Hindi at 24.8 percent, Urdu at 11.7 percent and Gujarati at 11.4 percent. Bazaar IQ runs in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English, so the owner and each helper can work in the language that suits them. Every GSTIN registered in Maharashtra begins with 27. Regular dealers get a tax invoice with HSN and the CGST and SGST halves on every bill, while a composition-scheme shop gets a Bill of Supply carrying the composition line the law requires and an unregistered one gets a plain cash memo. Building regulars who settle at the end of the month can run on khata, with each customer's balance updated at billing.