I run a software company in Pune. Like most offices here, our daily chai came from a vendor down the road — ordered by phone, tracked in his notebook, billed as one number at the end of the month.

We finally checked that number against what people actually drank. Across one month, a meaningful share of the cups on the invoice never arrived. Not fraud — nobody was stealing. The order was placed for 20, the tray showed up with 18 because two people were in a meeting, and the notebook still said 20. Repeat that thirty times and you're paying for a week of chai nobody drank.

The vendor wasn't winning either. He lost money the other way on days he sent extra cups for a client visit and forgot to write it down. Neither side had a record. Every month-end was a negotiation.

The insight that made it fixable: ordered and delivered are two different numbers, and almost every system treats them as one. So we built ChaiRoll around keeping them separate.

• The office orders 20 cups.

• The delivery person records that 18 actually arrived, with a reason.

• The office confirms 18.

• The invoice says 18.

Only a confirmed delivery becomes billable. That's the whole product. Everything else — recurring schedules, delivery-staff accounts, GST-ready invoices, per-team spending limits — exists to make that one loop take zero effort.

Three things we got wrong before landing there:

1. We started by building an ordering app. Wrong problem. Nobody in Pune struggles to order chai — a WhatsApp message works fine. They struggle to agree on the bill. Ordering is the easy half.

2. We tried to make the delivery person the source of truth. Vendors didn't trust a number their own staff typed in unsupervised, and offices didn't either. It only worked once the office had to confirm it, with a visible reason attached to any mismatch.

3. We assumed vendors would resist transparency. The opposite. Vendors chase overdue payments constantly, and a disputed invoice is the main reason a payment stalls. A record both sides already agreed to gets paid faster. That's the pitch to a vendor — not transparency, faster payment.

If you're building B2B for Indian SMBs, that third one generalises: the party you assume wants opacity usually just wants to get paid without an argument.

We're piloting now with offices and chai vendors in Pune. If you run an office here and your chai bill is still a handwritten number, I'd genuinely like to know what your version of that gap is.

chairoll.com