How to Write Amounts in Words in Lakh and Crore (PKR)

The place values

Pakistan, like India and Bangladesh, groups large numbers with lakh and crore, not with million and billion. The system is easy once you see that after the first three digits, every further place is grouped in twos.

Two conversions are worth remembering. Ten lakh is one million, and one crore is ten million. A figure quoted as 2.5 million is therefore 25 lakh.

How to group the digits

1. Start from the right and put the first comma after three digits: 125,000 starts as 125 with 000.
2. Move left and put a comma after every two digits from then on.
3. Read each group from the left, saying its place name: crore, lakh, thousand, then the last three digits.

So 12345678 is grouped as 1,23,45,678, and is read as one crore twenty three lakh forty five thousand six hundred and seventy eight. Western grouping would write the same figure as 12,345,678, which is correct for a pound or dollar amount but looks wrong to a reader used to lakh and crore.

Amounts and their words

Notice that “and” appears before the last tens and units in a group of hundreds, and before paisa, but not between lakh, thousand and hundred. Different offices follow different house styles, so the rule that matters is to be consistent.

Converting a figure step by step

There are two quick ways to read a large amount. The first is to divide by 100,000 to get lakh, and by 10,000,000 to get crore. The second is to group the digits and read them.

The decimal part is a fraction of the next place down. Half a lakh is 50 thousand, and half a crore is 50 lakh. If you can do this division in your head, you can check any amount in words quickly before you sign a cheque or an invoice.

To check an amount in words, read it back and rebuild the figure. For “Forty two lakh fifty thousand rupees only”, forty two lakh is 4,200,000 and fifty thousand is 50,000, which together make 4,250,000. If the rebuilt figure matches the number written in digits, the document is consistent.

Writing paisa

When an amount has paisa, write them after the rupees. For example, 12,345,678.50 is written as One crore twenty three lakh forty five thousand six hundred and seventy eight rupees and fifty paisa, and then the word only closes the sentence. If the paisa are zero, leave them out and write just the rupees.

Why write amounts in words at all

Figures are easy to change. A 1 can become a 7, and a 15,000 can become 150,000 by adding a zero. Words are much harder to alter, which is why cheques, invoices and receipts carry the amount in both forms. If the figures and the words disagree, the document is open to dispute, so when you write both, check that they match.

The word only at the end signals that nothing follows. It closes the line so that nobody can add more words after the amount.

Common mistakes

• Mixing systems, for example writing 2,500,000 and calling it twenty five million instead of twenty five lakh.
• Reading 1,00,000 as one thousand because of the commas. It is one lakh.
• Writing the figures and the words differently, which invites a dispute.
• Leaving a gap after the words so that more can be added.
• Forgetting the paisa, or writing them as a decimal in the words.
• Using the wrong currency word. The tool writes rupees for PKR, and pounds, euros or dollars for the other currencies.

Other currencies

The lakh and crore system belongs to rupee amounts in Pakistan and neighbouring countries. For pounds, euros, dollars and dirhams, the thousand, million and billion system is the usual one. The tools on this site follow that convention: amounts in PKR are written with lakh and crore, and the other currencies with thousand, million and billion.

Common questions

How this guide was prepared

This guide explains a numbering convention and shows output from the same word-conversion code the invoice, receipt and voucher tools use, so the examples match what the tools print. The conventions are widely used in Pakistan and are not defined by a single statute.

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