The bahi, the tally mark, and the fifth stroke

It started with a book, not an app

Walk into any shop in a small Indian town and there is a cloth-bound book under the counter. Red cloth, string tie, ruled by hand.

That book is not a primitive version of software. It is faster than an app for one entry, it needs no charge, and it is trusted because it is in the owner’s own hand.

What it cannot do is three things: count for you, exist in a second copy, and be read by the other person. Those three are where the month-end argument comes from, and they are the only things we set out to change.

Why the tally mark

Four strokes and a fifth across them. It is how a count is kept on a wall, on a packing slip, in a shop. It is the smallest possible picture of a record being made as it happens.

The fifth stroke is amber rather than indigo. In this app amber means part-way: something started and not finished. A count in progress is exactly that, and so is a company on its first module.

Why indigo

Because it is ink. Indigo is the colour of a ledger written by hand. Our reader already reads it as a record rather than as a brand.

Why the words are so plain

Our reader is a shop owner of about forty who reads English only partly. He is standing at a counter, on a phone that cost ten thousand rupees.

So we write "still to pay" rather than the accounting word for it, and "shop closed" rather than "holiday". If a word would not be said across a counter, it is not in the app.