Selling on credit is how Kuwait shops work. Salim takes the items, says he'll come back to pay, and leaves with goods worth 23 KD. Three months later you have eleven Salims, four Ahmads, and a notebook page with so much scribbling you can't tell who paid what.
This is the silent leak that drains small shops. The shop is profitable, the products move, but the bank account never quite reflects what it should. Why? Because half the "revenue" is actually money still owed by customers, and you don't know which ones.
Here's how to fix it.
The "who owes me" report in QuickBiz — one screen
Open the Customers section. Sort by outstanding balance (descending). You see:
- Every customer who currently owes you something — sorted by amount owed, biggest first
- The exact KD amount each one owes
- The date of their most recent credit sale or repayment
- Their phone number (one tap to call or WhatsApp)
That's the entire dunning workflow on one screen. Top of the list = who to call first. Bottom of the list = customers with small balances you might leave alone. No notebook. No memory. No guesswork.
Why this is hard without software
The notebook problem isn't that paper is bad — it's that paper can't add. To know "who owes me total" with a notebook, you have to:
- Open the notebook
- Flip to each customer's page (if they have one — many credit sales get written on whatever page was open)
- Read every entry and identify whether it's a sale or a payment
- Add and subtract in your head or on a calculator
- Hope you didn't skip an entry
- Repeat for every customer
This takes hours for any shop with more than 10 credit customers. Most owners do it once a quarter, find the math doesn't tie, and give up halfway through. By month-end the actual amount owed is somewhere between "what the notebook says" and "what feels right" — and neither is the real number.
How credit tracking works in QuickBiz, step by step
Three actions cover everything:
Recording a credit sale
- Add Sale → pick products → at payment, choose Credit
- Select the customer (or tap + to add Salim as a new customer in 5 seconds)
- Confirm
QuickBiz instantly: deducts inventory, records the sale, and increases the customer's outstanding balance. Their record now shows "Owes you 23.000 KD."
Recording a repayment
- Open Customers → tap Salim's name
- Tap "Add Payment" → enter the amount → choose Cash or Online
- Confirm
His outstanding balance reduces by that amount. The payment is recorded in his ledger. Your daily revenue includes the repayment in the right category.
Recording a partial repayment
Identical to a full repayment — you just enter the partial amount. QuickBiz handles the math. If he owed 23 KD and paid 10 KD today, his new outstanding is 13 KD. The ledger shows: sale 23 KD, payment 10 KD, balance 13 KD.
The customer statement (one PDF, full history)
When a customer wants to settle and asks "what's my total?", open their record and tap Share Statement. QuickBiz generates a PDF showing:
- Every credit sale (date, items, amount)
- Every payment received (date, amount, method)
- Current outstanding balance
Send it via WhatsApp. The customer sees the same data you do. Disputes resolve in one message because there's nothing to interpret.
Writing off a bad debt
Some credit never comes back. The customer moved, the phone is disconnected, the relationship soured — for whatever reason, the money is gone.
QuickBiz lets you write off a bad debt from inside the customer's ledger. The outstanding balance becomes zero, and the unpaid amount records as a bad-debt expense. Your profit reports then correctly reflect the loss — you don't keep "earning" revenue that will never arrive.
Writing off bad debts also clarifies the question of who actually owes you money. After write-offs, the customer list shows only the live, recoverable credit. Not the ghosts.
How most shops use the credit ledger weekly
The most common rhythm we hear:
- Every Friday morning — open the Customers screen, sort by outstanding, identify the top 5 customers by amount
- Send a polite WhatsApp to each — usually just sharing their statement with a "checking in" line
- Two-thirds reply within 24 hours with either a payment, a confirmed pickup date, or a question
- The remaining third get a second nudge the following week
- After 60-90 days of silence the credit gets written off
This routine recovers more credit in a month than three months of "I'll do it eventually" ever did.
What QuickBiz does NOT do (deliberately)
We're conservative about the credit-tracking feature:
- No auto-emailed dunning messages. QuickBiz doesn't send "your invoice is overdue" emails on your behalf. The customer relationship belongs to you, not the software.
- No credit-score reporting. Whatever your customer owes, that's between you and them — QuickBiz doesn't report it anywhere.
- No collection-agency integration. If you need to escalate a debt, you do it through your own channels, not through us.
The aim is to make YOUR job easier, not to put a layer of automation between you and the customer.
For supplier debt, same workflow flipped
Everything above applies equally to the supplier ledger — but flipped. Instead of "who owes me," the Suppliers screen sorts by "who I owe." Same statement export. Same payment-recording flow. See How Kuwait shop owners track supplier debt and customer credit for the full two-sided picture.
Try the credit ledger yourself
Start the 14-day QuickBiz free trial — no credit card, no follow-up emails. Add three test customers, record a few sample credit sales, and see how the "who owes me" screen feels. Most owners are convinced within the first session.