ProblemShop money
When family works in the shop without a salary
A brother or son who takes cash when he needs it is not being paid. Work out what he is worth, fix an amount and a date, and name every rupee between.
A brother or a son who works all day and takes cash when he needs it is not being paid, he is drawing money nobody counts. Fix an amount, pay it on a date, and write down what he takes in between. It costs you nothing and it saves the relationship.
The arrangement nobody ever agreed to
Nobody sat down and decided this. Your younger brother started helping at the counter after school. Your son took over the deliveries when you were unwell. Your wife's cousin came for two weeks and stayed for three years.
There was never a conversation about pay, because at the beginning there was nothing to talk about. He was helping. You fed him, you gave him a hundred rupees when he asked, you bought him a shirt when there was something to celebrate. That was the whole arrangement and it worked, because the amounts were small and the time was short.
Then it stopped being short. Now he opens the shop on the days you cannot, he knows the rates better than your helper does, and he takes Rs 500 out of the drawer on his way out without asking, because after three years asking would feel strange.
And that, quietly, is the problem. Not the Rs 500. The fact that nobody knows what he is owed, what he has taken, or what he is worth.
What "he takes what he needs" actually costs you
Three separate things go wrong, and only one of them is about money.
The same person, two arrangements
A fixed amount on a fixed date
- Your costs are true, so your profit figure is true
- He feels paid, once a month, by an amount that is his
- Advances come off; loans are repaid; gifts are closed
- The day he leaves, there is nothing left to argue about
- Anyone can see what he has had over the whole year in ten seconds
Cash from the drawer when he asks
- Money leaves with no head on it, so the shop looks richer than it is
- He feels handed pocket money, never paid
- Nobody can say whether a payment was an advance or a gift
- Two honest people end up with two different totals
- The argument goes home with both of you
Your own figures stop being true. Money leaving the drawer with no head on it does not appear anywhere as a cost. So your shop looks more profitable than it is, and every decision you make on those figures is made on a number that is too high. That is exactly the trouble behind working out your shop's real profit, except this version is invisible even to you.
He never feels paid. This one surprises shopkeepers. A person who has taken Rs 14,000 over a full year in fifties and hundreds does not feel he has received Rs 14,000. He feels he has been given pocket money by somebody who has the drawer. There is no month where he thinks, that is mine, I earned it. That feeling is the thing you are actually taking from him, and it is far more expensive than the cash.
Nobody can ever settle it. The day he leaves, marries, moves to a city or falls out with you, two people will sit down with two completely different totals in their heads. He will remember the work. You will remember the money. Both of you will be honest and both of you will be wrong, and there is no record on earth to settle it with.
Put a number on what he is worth
Before anything else, work out what you would pay a stranger to do exactly what he does. Not what you can afford. Not what feels fair to family. What the work costs in the open market.
Say your brother opens, sits and closes six days a week
An example, not a real family. Put your own bazaar's wage in and the answer changes, but the method does not.
Do this sum honestly even if you never show it to him, because it is the only way to know whether you are running a shop or being carried by a relative.
Most shopkeepers find one of two things. Either he is doing a Rs 25,000 job and drawing Rs 12,000, which means the shop is quietly living off him and he will work out the arithmetic himself one day. Or he is drawing more than the work is worth, which is also worth knowing, because that is a family decision you are entitled to make on purpose rather than by accident.
There is a third case and it is the most common of all: he does a Rs 25,000 job for eight months of the year and disappears for four, and neither of you has ever admitted that out loud. A fixed amount forces that conversation, which is uncomfortable once and useful forever.
Start your digital khata today
Free to start. Works offline. English, Roman Urdu & Hinglish. Your customers get their app free, forever.
Fix an amount, even a small one
The repair is not complicated and it does not need to be generous. It needs to be certain.
Five sentences that end this for good
- 1Name the amount out loudSmall is fine. Uncertain is not. Say what the shop can carry today.
- 2Fix the date it is paidThe date is what turns pocket money into a wage. Keep it even in a thin week.
- 3Count food, a room, a phone billNot to charge him. So that both of you are looking at the same whole.
- 4Name every rupee taken in betweenAdvance, loan or gift, decided at the moment it leaves the drawer.
- 5Agree when it will be looked at againSix months, a year, a date. A promise to review is easier to give than a raise.
Two parts of that matter more than the rest.
A date. The date is what turns pocket money into a salary. Money that arrives on the seventh of every month is earned. Money that arrives when it is asked for is given, and the difference between those two words is the entire problem you are solving.
The number can be small. If the shop genuinely cannot carry a market wage, say so, and fix a smaller amount honestly. "The shop can carry Rs 15,000 today. When the trade grows we will look at it again in six months." That is a real arrangement that a grown man can accept. What nobody can accept is not knowing.
If food, a room or a phone bill are part of what he gets, name them and put a number on them too. Not to charge him, but so both of you can see the whole of it. A Rs 15,000 salary plus food and a room is a different thing from a Rs 15,000 salary, and only one of those two versions is in his head right now.
The money he takes in between
Fixing a salary does not stop him taking cash from the drawer, and pretending it will is how this comes back a year later.
He will still need Rs 2,000 on a day that is not the seventh. That is normal and it is not the problem. The problem is that the Rs 2,000 has no name.
Give it one. Every rupee that leaves outside the salary is one of exactly three things, and you decide which at the moment it happens, not afterwards:
An advance against the salary that is coming, which comes off it on the date. A loan, which does not come off the salary and is repaid separately on terms you both said out loud. A gift, which is yours to give and is never mentioned again in either direction.
Every argument between a shopkeeper and a relative about money comes from one side calling a payment an advance and the other side calling it a gift. Naming it at the moment costs four seconds. Naming it a year later is impossible, which is the same reason a helper's salary and advances need separating even when the helper is not family.
And whatever he takes, take it out of the shop's money properly. Cash that leaves the drawer for a household reason is not a shop cost, and mixing the two is how you end a good year with no idea where it went. Keeping shop money and house money apart is doubly important when the person taking it lives in your house.
When he asks for more
He will, and it usually arrives at the worst possible moment, in front of somebody, in a sentence that sounds like an accusation.
If you have been paying a fixed amount on a fixed date, this conversation is easy, because there is something real to talk about. You can look at what the shop earned, what the work is worth now, and what changed. You may say yes, you may say not yet, and either answer is respectable.
If you have been handing him cash for three years, the same conversation has no ground under it. He cannot say what he has been getting and you cannot say what you have been giving, so both of you argue about feelings instead, and the argument does not end when the shop closes. It goes home.
There is a version of this that is worse and quieter: he stops asking. A relative who has decided he is being used does not usually announce it. He arrives later, leaves earlier, stops noticing what needs doing, and one day he has a job somewhere else. By then the conversation you should have had two years ago cannot be had at all.
The day it ends, and how to make that ordinary
Every one of these arrangements ends. He marries and needs a real income. He gets an offer in another city. You bring your own son in and there is suddenly one counter too few. Or you simply grow old and the shop changes hands.
A shop that has been paying a fixed amount on a fixed date ends this well. There is nothing to unpick. He was paid to a date, his last advance came off his last payment, and whatever comes next is a decision rather than a settlement.
Write it down, so nobody has to remember
None of this survives on memory. Two people who love each other remember money completely differently, and the honest one remembers it worst.
So keep it somewhere both of you could look at: the fixed amount, the date it is paid, every advance and every loan, and the day each was settled. It does not have to be elaborate. It has to exist.
That is what Wasoolo's employee side is for. A person gets a fixed salary and a payment date, an advance is recorded as an advance, a loan as a loan, and each month the app shows what was paid and what is still owed, in one list you can hand him. When somebody asks what he has had over the whole year, nobody has to remember anything, and nobody has to be believed.
The point is not to treat family like staff. It is to make sure that the day this arrangement ends, and it will end, it ends over tea instead of in a room full of relatives who have all been told a different total.
He would be insulted if I offered him a fixed salary. What then?
Offer it as a share of the shop's costs rather than a wage. "This is what the shop puts aside for you every month." Same amount, same date, and nobody has to feel like staff.
My son will inherit the shop. Why pay him at all?
Because a share of something years away does not buy his groceries now. Pay him for the work today and settle the ownership separately, in writing, when you are ready.
What if the shop truly cannot afford a proper wage?
Say the number out loud and fix a smaller one. An honest small amount on a certain date beats a generous amount that arrives when it is asked for.
He takes goods from the shop rather than cash. Does that count?
Yes, at your selling rate, and it should be written down the same way. Goods leaving the shelf without a record is the version of this that hurts your stock as well as your figures.
Should the rest of the family know what he is paid?
Only the people whose money is in the shop. Partners and co-owners have a right to know a standing cost; cousins do not.
We have done it this way for years. Is it too late to change?
No. Start the new arrangement from a date, and do not try to settle the past. Say plainly that what came before is closed, and begin.