From Cash to Click

India's payments landscape looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Since the 2016 demonetisation of high-value currency notes, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the default rail for both consumer and merchant transactions. Most of the research produced on this shift, though, has looked at it from the consumer's side why people adopt digital payments, what keeps them using an app. Far less has been written about the businesses on the other end of those transactions, and almost nothing about how small and medium businesses in India's Tier 2 cities have actually managed the switch day to day. This study tries to close some of that gap by looking at cashless payment adoption among 100 business owners and professionals across five sectors Retail, IT, Supermarkets, Wholesale, and Banking in Nashik, Maharashtra. The design is descriptive-comparative, built loosely on the TAM and UTAUT. Primary data came from a 23-item questionnaire circulated through Google Forms, and was analysed using descriptive statistics alongside chi-square hypothesis testing. Adoption turns out to be almost universal: 89% of the businesses surveyed have gone cashless, UPI is the clear preference, and perhaps more interestingly adoption doesn't vary meaningfully by sector. In Nashik, at least, going cashless looks less like a 2 strategic choice some businesses make and others don't, and more like the operational baseline everyone has already settled into. The benefits businesses report are real and fairly consistent: faster transactions, better transparency, and less risk from handling cash. But the transition hasn't been frictionless. Three barriers keep coming up transaction charges, fraud and cybersecurity risk, and network connectivity problems. A chi-square goodness-of-fit test confirms that a perceived lack of digital knowledge is a genuine, statistically significant problem for respondents, which supports the study's alternative hypothesis. It closes with a stakeholder-specific recommendations aimed at telecom providers, banks and financial regulators, government bodies, and fintech developers all geared toward helping Nashik's small and medium businesses.