The inspector who walks into your shop is not interested in your app or your intentions — they ask for specific books, kept in specific shapes, up to date to the day. After twenty years of inspections at our own counter, here is the record-keeping that keeps a Karnataka gold-loan firm out of trouble.
The core books
- Gold loan ledger — every loan with date, pawner’s name and address, amount advanced, interest rate, and the ornaments pledged with weights.
- Pledge register — the running register of pledges taken and released, in serial order, nothing skipped.
- Cash book — daily receipts and payments, tallied.
- Delivery / redemption register — when a loan closes, who took the ornaments back, when, against which signature.
Districts phrase the requirements slightly differently, and inspectors have their own habits — but a firm that can produce these four, current and consistent with each other, has answered ninety percent of any inspection.
The paper the customer gets
Every pawner must receive a pledge receipt (pawn ticket) when the loan is made: loan number, date, amount, interest rate, description and weight of the ornaments, and your firm name with licence number. When they pay interest, they should get a receipt for that too — the receipt trail is what protects you when a dispute reaches a counter argument years later.
Interest caps and the register method
The government notifies maximum interest rates for licensed money lenders and pawnbrokers from time to time. Your register method — how you round part-months, when you compound — must stay inside the cap. See our guide to how gold loan interest is actually calculated for the conventions Karnataka firms use.
Notices, auctions and their paper trail
When a loan is overdue you must notice the pawner before auctioning the pledge — and be able to prove you did. Keep copies of every final notice and auction notice, the postal receipts, and the auction record with surplus refunded to the pawner. Our auction procedure guide walks the whole sequence.
Keeping it inspection-ready without a full-time clerk
This is exactly what GoldKhata was built for, inside a real licensed firm: the ledger, pledge register and delivery register fill themselves as you make loans and collect interest at the counter, and print in the statutory column format on demand. Notices come out with the licence number and go on record with dispatch tracking. When the inspector visits, you print today’s books — you don’t reconstruct last quarter’s.
Frequently asked questions
Can the registers be kept only in software?
Keep them printable in the statutory format at all times — that satisfies the inspector's real question, which is whether the books exist, are current and are consistent. Many firms also keep a bound physical register as belt-and-braces; GoldKhata prints its registers precisely so you can.
What does an inspection actually look like?
Typically: show the licence, produce the registers, and answer questions where entries look inconsistent — a pledge released with no delivery entry, interest that doesn't match the notified cap, gaps in serial numbers. Consistency across books is what they probe.
How long should old loan records be kept?
Keep closed-loan records for several years at minimum — disputes and legal notices surface long after release. Storage is cheap; a missing record in a dispute is not.