Dhanteras 2026 Puja at Shop or Office: Photos and Timings

Dhanteras 2026 is on Friday, 6 November, and if you run a shop, office or workshop, the easiest way to keep photos of the puja is to create one shared album and invite your staff, family and regular customers to add their pictures. That way the photos do not end up spread across a dozen phones by the time Lakshmi Puja arrives on Sunday, 8 November.

Most Dhanteras articles focus on the family puja at home. This one is for people who also celebrate at work, such as jewellers, kirana owners, small factory owners, clinics, coaching centres and offices that hold a short puja before Diwali. If that is you, you already know the day is busy, so here are the facts that matter and a simple plan for the photos.

Dates and timings to check

The thirteenth lunar day, Trayodashi, begins at 10:30 AM on Friday, 6 November and ends at 10:47 AM on Saturday, 7 November, according to Drik Panchang figures quoted by several sites. Alice Blue and DNA India both note that purchases after 10:30 AM on the 6th are considered auspicious, and DNA adds that many families prefer to finish shopping before the evening puja. For the puja itself, Asianet Newsable gives a Delhi window of about 6:02 to 7:57 PM, and the Free Press Journal gives about 6:35 to 8:34 PM, which shows how much published timings can differ.

The reason is that muhurat depends on your city and the calendar a site uses. HinduTone’s Hyderabad guide, for example, says the puja is done in Pradosh Kaal after sunset, around 5:42 PM in Hyderabad, and tells readers to confirm the exact time on Drik Panchang for their city. The sensible approach is to ask your family priest or check a panchang set to your own location, and fix the puja time for your shop or office on that basis.

How shops and offices celebrate

For many businesses, Dhanteras is a working day with a ceremony at the end. HinduTone notes that Marwari and Gujarati traders worship their account books, while other families focus on Lakshmi, Kubera and Dhanvantari. Jewellers and utensil shops are often at their busiest, since gold, silver and new utensils are the usual purchases, and Alice Blue is careful to add that buying gold is a custom, not a rule. The main Diwali Lakshmi Puja follows on Sunday, 8 November, which is also the day the NSE has scheduled Muhurat Trading, according to Alice Blue.

A typical shop puja is short. Staff clean and decorate the counter, the cash box and the shelves, set up the Lakshmi and Kubera images, light the diyas, and pray together. Sweets are shared, customers or neighbours drop in, and a family member usually takes a photo for the shop’s wall or phone. Offices do something similar, often with a rangoli at the entrance and a group photo outside.

Why the photos get scattered

The moment the puja starts, several people are taking pictures. The owner takes one, a son or daughter takes another, an employee clicks a group shot, and a customer takes a quick selfie with the decorated counter. Afterwards, each person sends pictures to someone else on WhatsApp, and the best ones end up in small groups where half the team never sees them.

WhatsApp is perfectly fine for sending a single greeting picture to a regular customer. It compresses photos, though, and chats move so quickly that finding last year’s group photo can take a long scroll. If you want one proper set of pictures from the day, you need one place where everyone drops what they took.

Ways to collect them

Google Photos shared albums work well if your team already uses Google Photos, and they keep quality high. The catch is that people usually need to be signed in, and in a shop where staff use different phones, that is not always easy. Google Drive is a good place for a photographer’s final files or for pictures that one person manages, but it gets messy when many people upload phone photos.

Rollout is a free app on Android and iPhone made for exactly this. The organiser creates an event and shares one QR code or link. Guests scan it, install the app and join, and every photo from every guest’s phone lands in one shared album, live and in full quality, with no WhatsApp compression. If you hire a photographer for a showroom puja, the organiser can upload their photos from a computer into the same album.

Face search is useful afterwards. Each person takes a selfie and sees just the photos they are in, so nobody has to scroll through hundreds of pictures to find themselves. Free events last 30 days, which is enough to cover all five days of Diwali and the weeks after, and bigger paid events exist for larger occasions such as a showroom launch or a society Diwali programme.

A simple plan for your shop or office

Choose one organiser, usually the owner or a trusted staff member, and create the album before opening time on Dhanteras. Print the QR code on a small card and keep it near the puja, or show it on a phone at the counter. Also share the link in your staff group so people who are off that day can join and add their pictures later.

Ask staff to join before the puja starts, because installing an app halfway through the aarti is nobody’s idea of a good time. A short message such as add your puja photos here is enough. You can then keep the same album going for Lakshmi Puja on Sunday and later festivities, so the whole of Diwali sits in one place.

Be careful about what you photograph

Shops hold valuable things, so use some judgement. Avoid photographing cash, ledgers with customer details, jewellery stock, locker areas or security equipment, and keep pictures of the interior within your own team. Ask customers before photographing them, and do not post anyone’s picture on public social media without permission.

The same goes for children and elders who may be in the shop. Keep the album to people you invited, and remove anything someone is not comfortable with. A shared album should feel like a record of a good day, not a worry.

Dhanteras at work is a short, busy and cheerful occasion, and the pictures are often the only record of it. Set up the album early, share the link, and let everyone add what they take, so you can find the day’s best photos easily when the festival is over.