Rabi asks less of a pesticide shelf than kharif and much more of a khaad godown. It is also the season that tests a dealer's cash flow hardest, because the credit goes out in October and comes back in April.

The shape of the season

  • Sowing, from late October into November across most of Punjab, with the basal dose going in with the seed. This is the DAP window, and it is short.
  • First irrigation and top dressing, a few weeks later. This is the urea window, and it repeats.
  • Weedicide, once the crop and the weeds are both up — a narrow, unforgiving window where being out of stock for a week means the sale went elsewhere.
  • Harvest in April, which is when the khata gets settled.

Two implications a dealer feels every year: the fertiliser rush is concentrated into a few weeks, and everything sold on udhaar in October is money you do not see for six months.

Fertiliser is a different stock problem

Khaad is not dawai. It does not expire, which removes one worry and adds another: nothing forces you to move it, so slow bags sit until you notice the capital is gone.

What it demands instead:

  • Volume and space. Boris take room. Over-buying is not a shelf problem, it is a godown problem.
  • Rate movement. Urea and DAP rates move, and a bag bought at one rate and sold weeks later at another has a margin only your records know. If purchases are not recorded per consignment at the rate you paid, the profit figure is a guess.
  • Concentrated demand. A dealer who is short of DAP in the sowing fortnight does not lose one sale — the farmer buys the rest of his list at the shop that had it.

Count boris in boris. A 50 kg bag priced and counted per bag, not per kilo, means the rate on the bill is the rate you quoted and the margin needs no arithmetic to check.

The credit problem rabi creates

The pattern is the same in every wheat district: input on udhaar in October, settlement after the April harvest. Six months, and often on top of whatever kharif left unpaid.

Three things make that survivable:

Know the opening position before you extend more. A farmer with a kharif balance still outstanding is a different decision from one starting clean. That means the balance has to be visible at the counter when the sale is being made — not looked up afterwards in a register.

A credit limit is a conversation, not a rule. Set one, and let the software warn when a sale would pass it. Sometimes you go past it anyway, knowingly. The point is to notice.

Record part payments against bills, oldest first. Rabi credit gets paid down in pieces. A payment that reduces one number and nothing else is where disputes start — "I paid you 20,000 in January" is true, and so is "you still owe", and without bill-by-bill history neither can be shown.

Before the season

  • Clear kharif recovery first. Whatever is still outstanding in September is capital that will not be available in October, and after the wheat is sown a farmer's cash is gone until April.
  • Settle company accounts, or know exactly what is owed. The DAP consignment is easier to negotiate when you can state your own position.
  • Check what expires over winter. Dawai does not stop ageing because the season is quiet. Anything dated for the first half of the year should move now or go back.

After harvest

April is the only month of the year when farmers have cash and dealers have time. That combination does not repeat until the next harvest, which is why recovery work done in April is worth several times the same effort in June.

A recovery list sorted by amount, with each farmer's history behind it, turns that month from a series of awkward conversations into a sequence of specific ones.

AgroPOS keeps bag stock, company payables and the farmer khata in one place, so the October decisions and the April recovery both start from the same numbers. See also the kharif stocking guide.