The parts that take some explaining
Some features fit on a bullet point. These eight do not — they are the ones that sound like marketing until you see the mechanism. So each one below is set out the same way: how it works, a worked example of somebody using it, and the design decision behind it that is usually the most convincing part.
Accounting
Point your phone at a till slip or forward a supplier invoice. Vendorah reads it, shows you every field it pulled off the page, and once you approve it the expense is posted to the ledger as a real double-entry journal — not a note in a list.
A hardware store owner comes back from the wholesaler with a handful of slips.
The result: The expense is in the books, the VAT is claimable, and the photograph stays attached to the entry as the supporting document.
A person is always the one who posts it
Nothing the extractor produces reaches the ledger on its own. Approval requires a named user, and journal entries are immutable once written — a mistake past that line is corrected by a reversal that stays in the audit trail forever, never by a silent edit. That asymmetry is why the review step exists rather than an “auto-file” toggle.
Accounting
Drop in the statement your bank gives you — OFX, CSV or PDF. Vendorah parses it, works out which lines your books already know about, categorises the rest, and posts only what you approve.
A café owner who has been photographing receipts all month imports February’s statement.
The result: The month is reconciled, the bank balance in the books matches the statement, and nothing was booked twice.
A matched line is never posted by default
This is the check that makes bank import safe to offer at all. An owner who has been capturing receipts already has most of the month recorded; the statement is a second account of the same events. Import it blind and every captured cost is booked again — and the trial balance still balances perfectly, because two plausible entries for one real event is not an imbalance. It is just wrong. A false match costs one line of your attention; a missed one costs a wrong set of books.
Accounting
Vendorah keeps proper double-entry books behind your shop — not a sales report dressed up as accounting. Every figure is held in integer cents, every report is generated from the journal, and all of it exports as CSVs an accountant can open without asking you a single question.
It is the end of the tax year and an accountant has asked for “the usual”.
The result: No screenshots, no “can you just send me the sales figures”, no rebuilding the year from bank statements in March.
The export is hardened, not just formatted
Text cells beginning with =, + or @ are escaped before they leave. Account names and memos are typed by owners, and a spreadsheet treats a leading equals sign as a formula — which is both a corrupted export and, with the right payload, a way to run something on your accountant’s machine. Amounts are exempt, because a negative figure has to stay a number.
Catalogue
The fastest way to get a physical shop online. Photograph a product twice — front and back — and Vendorah reads the packaging, decodes the barcode, reads the shelf price and assembles a finished listing. No typing.
A small grocer with 400 lines on the shelves and nothing online.
The result: An aisle becomes a catalogue in an afternoon instead of a fortnight of typing, and every product is filed by the same rules as the rest of the shop.
Two deliberate limits, both to keep the session moving
Nothing is uploaded until you save — the captures live in memory, so a bad photograph or a phone call costs the store nothing and leaves no orphan files. And a stock-taken product starts as collection-only, because courier delivery needs parcel dimensions and a shelf photograph does not contain them. Requiring them would stop an unattended capture dead at the last step, which is the one thing this feature exists to avoid. You add dimensions later, in bulk.
Tools
Point a QR code at anything — your storefront, one product, a booking page, a menu — and style it to match your brand. Generated in the browser, downloadable in four formats, with your own logo in the middle.
A food truck that wants people in the queue ordering on their phones.
The result: One code, on-brand, that scans off a sign at two metres and works just as well at 40 pixels in a social post.
SVG is the one that matters for print
A QR code printed from a PNG is only as sharp as the pixels it was exported at, and a sign blown up from a screen-sized export scans badly in poor light. The SVG is vector — the same file works on a business card and a pavement banner.
Storefront
Seven full storefront designs, each a complete website rather than a colour scheme. Preview one with your own products already in it, edit the text and images directly on the page, recolour it to your brand, and promote it to your live store with one button.
A homeware maker whose storefront looks like everyone else’s.
The result: The public store URL now renders a designed site with their catalogue in it — no theme files, no developer, and reversible if they change their mind.
Templates read a fixed data feed, not your database
Every template renders from the same published storefront feed, addressed by path. That is why a template written for one shop works unchanged for every other one — and why a typo in one binding leaves one blank slot instead of failing the whole page.
Bookings
Most booking systems can hold a diary for staff. Vendorah models anything whose time gets consumed — a person, a treatment room, a laser, a salon chair, a bakkie — as the same kind of thing. So a service that needs a technician *and* a machine *and* a bay books all three, or it does not book at all.
A beauty salon offering laser hair removal, which needs a certified therapist, the laser unit, and a private room.
The result: No double-booked equipment, no appointment accepted that the salon physically cannot deliver, and a reassignment that takes one drag instead of three phone calls.
One entity for people and things is the whole trick
Modelling a stylist and a chair as the same kind of record is what lets a service require “one stylist AND one chair” without special-casing either. A system that treats staff as first-class and equipment as an afterthought cannot express that requirement at all — which is why so many salons end up with a second, paper diary for the machines.
Bookings
The same calendar sells rooms, cottages, units and venues by the night — with per-night pricing, seasons, guest limits, deposits and cleaning turnover, alongside the appointments in the same diary.
A guesthouse with four rooms and a function room, half its bookings coming from Airbnb.
The result: One calendar for rooms, the venue and any appointments — with double-bookings across channels prevented rather than apologised for.
A mirrored booking is never invoiced
A stay imported from Airbnb or Booking.com holds the dates and nothing else, because it was already paid on that channel. Only a direct booking — one Vendorah took the money for — produces an invoice. Getting this wrong is how a guesthouse ends up billing a guest twice for the same week.
These are not eight products sold together. The receipt you photograph and the bank line you import land in the same ledger the accountant exports. The product you photograph off a shelf is filed by the same rules as one you type in, sells through the same checkout, and shows up in the same books. The calendar that books a technician and a laser is the calendar that sells a room by the night. And Vallery can read across all of it, because it is all in one place to begin with.
Everything above comes with a Vendorah store — not as add-ons billed separately.