Can I just give my staff my login?

You can, and it is the most common arrangement in small shops. It also means no entry can be attributed to anyone, your subscription and profile are exposed, and a departing employee keeps access until you change the password. If you do it, treat it as temporary.

What if my khata app has no staff accounts?

Use the paper-then-enter fallback: staff record on a slip during the day, you enter them yourself at close. Slower, but one person owns the digital record and mistakes are traceable to a slip you can still read.

How do I handle a staff member leaving?

Remove their access the same day, before the last shift ends rather than after. If they used a shared login, change the password immediately — and remember it is also on their phone, so an app sign-out is not enough.

Should staff be able to delete entries?

No. Adding entries is a routine job; deleting them removes evidence. Staff should be able to create and, if necessary, flag an error for you to correct. Deletion is an owner action.

Is a staff advance an expense?

No — it is money owed back to the shop, usually recovered from wages. Recording it as an expense understates that month's profit and overstates it later. Treat the staff member as a party with a balance, like any customer.

Digital Khata

Sharing Your Khata With Staff Without Losing Control

25 August 2026 · LenDen Team · 7 min read

If someone else serves at your counter, they need to make entries — and the moment two people share one login, your khata loses the ability to answer "who recorded this?". That question matters exactly when something is wrong.

The fix is separate access per person where the app supports it, and a paper-then-enter routine where it does not.

The short version

A shared login means no entry can be attributed to anyone. Treat it as temporary.
Staff should create entries; only you should delete or edit historical ones.
No staff accounts in your app? Staff write slips, you enter at close.
Remove access on the last day, not the week after.
A staff advance is a balance owed to the shop, not an expense.

Nothing goes wrong for months. Then a party's balance is ₹1,200 out and you have four problems at once.

You cannot tell who entered it. Not to blame anyone — to understand it. Was it a mis-tap, a misheard amount, or a customer who genuinely paid and the entry never got made? Each has a different fix, and the ledger cannot distinguish them because every entry carries the same identity.

Everything is exposed. Your profile, your subscription, your other businesses if you run more than one, and the ability to delete anything. Staff do not need any of that to record a sale.

Access outlives employment. Someone who leaves keeps the credentials until you remember to change them. The password is also saved on their phone, so signing out of the app achieves nothing.

Nobody owns the record. When two people can both edit and neither is identified, the honest answer to "is this balance right?" becomes "probably". A khata whose accuracy is probable is not much better than the notebook it replaced.

None of this requires anyone to behave badly. It is a structural gap.

What to look for if your app supports staff access

Three things, in order of importance:

1. Separate identity per person. Every entry carries an author. This alone solves most of the problem — not as surveillance, but so a pattern is visible. If the same person's entries are regularly ₹50 out, that is a training issue you can only see if entries are attributed.

2. Permissions that match the job. A counter staff member should be able to add parties and record transactions. They should not be able to delete entries, edit historical ones, remove parties, change subscription settings, or export the full ledger. The principle: creating is routine, destroying is not.

3. A visible per-party history. Not just a balance, but the trail of entries behind it with dates. Without this you cannot reconstruct anything, whoever made the entry. Reading that trail is covered in reading a party ledger.

Do not give staff a business switcher into your other shops

If you run more than one shop, staff at one should not see the other's parties or balances. Where an app scopes access per business, use it. Where it does not, that is a real argument for a separate account rather than shared access — see running two shops from one khata.

The fallback that actually works

Many khata apps — LenDen among them at present — do not offer per-staff accounts. Rather than sharing your login, use this:

During the day, staff record on a slip. A pre-ruled pad by the till with four columns: party, amount, given or received, and their initial. Nothing else.

At close, you enter them yourself. Ten to fifteen entries takes a few minutes, and you are reading each one as you go — which catches the ambiguous ones the same evening rather than in November.

Keep the slips for a month. They are your attribution layer. If a balance is queried, the slip shows who wrote it down and what they wrote.

It is slower than direct staff access, and it has two real advantages. One person owns the digital record, so it is internally consistent. And you personally read every transaction daily, which is the single habit most likely to catch an error while it is still cheap.

The failure mode to avoid: letting slips accumulate for a week. Then you are reconstructing from other people's handwriting, which is worse than either alternative. Same day, every day, or it does not work.

What staff need to be told

Three rules, said once and written above the till:

Every udhaar goes on the slip, immediately. Not remembered, not at the end of the shift. An unrecorded entry is invisible and unrecoverable.
Write what it was for. "₹340 — oil, dal" not "₹340". This is what makes the entry verifiable later.
If unsure, ask — do not guess. A missing entry you know about is fixable. A guessed amount that enters the books looks correct and is not.

Then one rule for you: do not ask staff to make credit decisions. Whether a party gets udhaar, and how much, is an owner decision — because it is your capital. Give staff the limits in writing per party if they need to act on them, and the answer to anything not on the list is "puchh ke bataunga". Setting those limits is covered in udhaar limits.

Staff advances are not expenses

A small but consistently expensive bookkeeping error.

When you give a staff member ₹3,000 as an advance against wages, that is not a business expense — it is money owed back to the shop, normally recovered from their next payment. Recording it as an expense understates your profit that month and overstates it when the recovery happens, which is why staff cost lines in small shops look erratic for no apparent reason.

Handle it the same way you handle a customer: the staff member is a party with a balance. The advance is given, each wage deduction is received, and the balance shows what is still outstanding. It also means both of you can see the same number, which prevents the most common wage argument there is.

Do keep this separate from their salary record. The advance ledger tracks what is owed; the wage record tracks what was earned. Merging them makes both unreadable.

When someone leaves

A short checklist, done on the last day rather than the following week:

Remove their access or change the shared password before the final shift ends.
Settle any advance balance against final wages, and post the entries so the party closes at zero.
Reconcile the last week's slips against the app while they are still available to ask.
Check the parties they dealt with most for anything unusual — not from suspicion, but because their pending questions leave with them.

That last one is the practical reason to keep attribution at all. Not to catch anyone out — to know which threads are now loose.

The wider point

Sharing a khata is really about whether your records can survive more than one person touching them. The habits that make that possible are the same ones that make a khata worth keeping in the first place: entries made the same day with what they were for, balances derived from those entries, and corrections that leave a trace rather than erasing one. All of it is in how to keep a digital udhar khata, and the correction discipline specifically in how to fix a wrong khata entry.

Frequently asked

Can I just give my staff my login?: You can, and it is the most common arrangement in small shops. It also means no entry can be attributed to anyone, your subscription and profile are exposed, and a departing employee keeps access until you change the password. If you do it, treat it as temporary.
What if my khata app has no staff accounts?: Use the paper-then-enter fallback: staff record on a slip during the day, you enter them yourself at close. Slower, but one person owns the digital record and mistakes are traceable to a slip you can still read.
How do I handle a staff member leaving?: Remove their access the same day, before the last shift ends rather than after. If they used a shared login, change the password immediately — and remember it is also on their phone, so an app sign-out is not enough.
Should staff be able to delete entries?: No. Adding entries is a routine job; deleting them removes evidence. Staff should be able to create and, if necessary, flag an error for you to correct. Deletion is an owner action.
Is a staff advance an expense?: No — it is money owed back to the shop, usually recovered from wages. Recording it as an expense understates that month's profit and overstates it later. Treat the staff member as a party with a balance, like any customer.