Tailor Book: The Measurement Register That Fits in Your Pocket

Every tailoring shop has the register. It sits by the counter with a soft spine and a pen tied to it, and it holds years of chest, waist and sleeve lengths in handwriting only one person can read. It works, until the day a page tears, tea spills on it, or a customer of ten years walks in and you have to turn back through three registers to find him.

Tailor Book is that register, moved onto your phone. It records each customer's measurements, prices the order, tracks the advance and the balance, and sends the invoice on WhatsApp. It is free, it needs no account, and it works with no internet at all.

Measurements the way you already take them

The app does not ask you to change how you work. You measure garment by garment, as you do now: kameez, shalwar, waistcoat, trouser, shirt, coat, sherwani. If you stitch something that is not on the list, add it, along with whatever fields it needs.

Inches go in the way you say them out loud. Type 38, tap ½, and it reads 38½. Quarters and eighths are on the same bar above the keyboard. Shops that work in centimetres can switch, and nothing is lost in the change.

As you move from field to field, a drawn figure shows where on the body that measurement is taken. This is useful for a new karigar, and useful for you when a garment has a field you rarely fill in.

Two more things matter in a busy shop:

• It saves as you type. If a phone call or another customer interrupts a fitting, nothing is lost.
• Every visit is kept with its date. When a customer comes back, you start from last time's numbers and change only what has moved. You can put two visits side by side and see exactly what changed.

Men, women and kids

When you add a customer you choose men, women or kids. From then on the app offers the right garments for that customer, draws the right figure, and groups your rate card the same way. Ladies tailors and boutiques are not left to bend a gents' catalogue to fit.

Orders, advances and balances

Set your rate card once: a stitching price for each garment, plus extras such as lining, embroidery, piping or urgent delivery. After that an order takes a few taps. Pick the customer, pick the garments, and quantity and price are filled in for you.

Give a discount as an amount or a percentage. Record the advance, and every payment after it. The app works out the balance and marks the order unpaid, part paid or paid. If someone types a payment larger than what is owed, the app catches it before it is saved.

Each order also carries a delivery day. The Home screen shows what has to leave the shop today and how many orders are due, so the first thing you see in the morning is the work that cannot wait.

Invoices on WhatsApp

Your customers are already on WhatsApp, so that is where the invoice goes. One tap sends a summary to the customer's chat, or the full invoice as a PDF. It works with both WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business.

Invoices are numbered automatically and carry your shop's name, phone number and address. If money is still owed, you can send a short, polite balance reminder, and the app shows when each invoice and reminder went out. Anything can be printed or saved as a PDF as well.

Design photos and measurement slips

Customers bring a fabric, a picture on their phone, or a garment they want copied. Photograph it and it stays with that customer's measurements, so the karigar is not working from memory a week later.

The measurement slip can be printed, sent as a PDF on WhatsApp, or exported to CSV.

In English and in Urdu

The whole app is available in Urdu, laid out right to left as Urdu should be. A shop that chooses Urdu on first launch gets its garment list in Urdu too. Urdu names print correctly on invoice PDFs, which is harder than it sounds and something many apps get wrong.

Your records stay on your phone

This is the part we care about most. Customer names, phone numbers, addresses, measurements, photos, orders and payments are stored on your phone. They are not uploaded to our servers, because there are no servers to upload them to.

That is also why the app works in airplane mode. You only need a connection at the moment you send something on WhatsApp.

Because the records live on your phone, backing them up is in your hands. The app packs everything into a single file. Keep a copy in Google Drive or send it to yourself on WhatsApp, and restoring on a new phone takes a few taps. We suggest doing this once a week.

What it costs

Tailor Book is free. It is supported by ads: a small banner on a few of the screens you read rather than type in, and an occasional full-screen ad when you return to the app after some time away. There are no ads on the forms where you enter measurements or orders. The ads are not given anything you type into the app.

Getting started

Setup takes about a minute. Choose your language, enter your shop's name, phone and address, and add your first customer. Prices are in Pakistani rupees by default, with Indian rupees, taka, dirham, riyal, pounds, dollars and others available in Settings.

Download Tailor Book on Google Play

If you run a shop and try it, tell us what is missing. The best ideas in this version came from people who measure for a living.

WhatsApp is a trademark of WhatsApp LLC. Tailor Book is not affiliated with or endorsed by WhatsApp.