Start from the law, not the feature list
Most pharmacy software gets sold on billing speed and a medicine database. Both matter, but neither is what makes pharmacy software different from ordinary retail or accounting software. Two legal requirements are: the Schedule H1 register under D&C Rules Rule 65 — every qualifying sale needs the prescriber's name, the patient's details, the batch and the quantity recorded and retained for three years, open to inspection — and the outright block on selling expired stock, which Section 27 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act makes an offence rather than a warning. Software built for pharmacies handles both automatically. Software adapted from general retail or accounting (Tally, Vyapar, Busy and similar) does neither, and a pharmacy running one of those typically keeps the H1 register on paper alongside it — legal, but slow, and the first thing an inspector asks for.
What to actually check before switching
- Schedule H1 register — written automatically per sale, not a manual entry screen you have to remember to fill in.
- Expiry handling — expired batches blocked at the counter, not just flagged with a warning that can be dismissed.
- GST correctness — the current slabs applied per medicine (5% on most, after the September 2025 GST Council revision; 12% or 18% on others), not one hardcoded rate across the catalogue.
- Offline resilience — does billing keep working when the connection drops, and how does it reconcile once it's back.
- Published pricing — a number on the page, not "book a walkthrough" as the only way to find out what it costs.
- Your own data, on your own file — ask to see a migration of your actual stock CSV, not a demo running on the vendor's sample data.
Cloud versus desktop — a real tradeoff, not a marketing angle
If your shop's internet is genuinely unreliable rather than occasionally slow, a desktop-installed, offline-first system is more robust than any web app through a long outage — it never depends on a browser holding local state. A cloud web app trades some of that robustness for flexibility: the same shop opens on the counter PC, the owner's phone at home, and a second counter during a rush, with nothing to install and nothing to keep in sync between machines. A Progressive Web App that caches locally, like Nesayo, sits in between — it bills through an ordinary connection drop and syncs on reconnect, though a desktop-native build still wins in a multi-hour blackout. Be skeptical of any single vendor claiming to be unambiguously best on this axis; it is a real engineering tradeoff, not a solved problem.
What "free" usually isn't
Marg ERP, the desktop system most established Indian pharmacies already run, charges roughly ₹4,000 a year for billing alone plus an annual AMC — about ₹12,000 over three years before any AI or mobile features. Several newer products publish a genuinely free billing tier and charge only for optional add-ons; a few others use "free" to mean a time-limited trial. The distinction matters enough to check directly on the pricing page rather than take a sales call's word for it. See a full worked comparison on Nesayo vs Marg ERP, or every current comparison on the comparisons index.
Where to go next
If you want the compliance detail rather than the buying advice, the pharmacy glossary covers PTR/PTS, Schedule H/H1/X, FEFO and GSTR terms in plain English, and the free tools page has calculators and register-format templates you can use regardless of which software you end up choosing. To see how this looks by city — the wholesale market and the regional voice-billing language change, the compliance requirements don't — see pharmacy software by city.