Paper & Pen and Q+ are two business software products from BHD Group. Both run on the ERP engine we first built for our own companies. Paper & Pen is a full cloud ERP for any business. Q+ is a simple front counter for service shops, with that same ERP behind it.
I wrote about the decision to build our own ERP in a separate essay. This page is about what came after: how one internal system became two products, and why we made two.
Paper & Pen: the full ERP
Paper & Pen is a cloud ERP and invoicing platform. A business uses it for sales, inventory, accounting, HR and payroll, and reports. Each company gets its own workspace address and its own private database.
Sales and invoicing are free, with no time limit and no card at sign-up. A company adds paid modules when it needs them. There are more than 40 modules to choose from.
Two choices shaped the product from the start.
The first is language. Paper & Pen works in Arabic, English, Hindi, Bengali and Urdu. A user can switch the interface at any time. The data stays the same; only the screens change. In the Gulf, the owner, the accountant and the shop staff often read different languages. One system has to serve all of them.
The second is currency. A business can bill in any currency. We built it in Oman, but we did not build it only for Oman.
Q+: the front counter
Paper & Pen suits a company with an office and an accountant. A barber shop, a café or a car wash works in a different way. The owner is often on the floor, and the team serves one customer after another.
For these businesses we built Q+. It is business software for service shops in Oman. It runs on a phone, as an app or in the browser. It covers the parts of the day a counter needs:
- a live customer queue, with tickets and a wait time on screen
- quick sale and payment by cash or card
- VAT at the rate the business sets, such as Oman VAT
- loyalty points for repeat customers
- a live owner view of sales, costs and orders
Invoicing, point of sale, the live queue and appointments are free. Loyalty, accounting and HR are paid modules, priced per business, per month.
One engine under both
Q+ runs on the Paper & Pen engine. Every sale at the counter becomes an invoice, a payment and the accounting entries in the same system.
This was the main design decision. Many small shops keep the queue in one app and the till in another. The books sit in a spreadsheet. At month end, someone copies numbers from one to the other, and errors creep in. With Q+, the counter and the books are one record.
It also means a shop does not have to change systems when it grows. The owner can open the full Paper & Pen ERP from inside Q+. The data is already there.
What I learned
A product for other companies is harder than a system for your own. Inside BHD, we can explain a screen to a colleague. A customer we never meet must understand it alone. That pushed us to make every screen and every setup step clearer.
The second lesson is about scope. We did not try to make one product for every business. We kept one engine and built two front doors: one for the office, one for the counter. Each product stays simple for its user, and the hard parts (money, tax, accounting) are built once.
Our own companies still run on the same engine every day. So we use what we sell, and we see its faults early.
Related: Why we built our own ERP instead of buying one and BHD Group ventures.