Keep every customer's number and address current

Take the number the day the khata opens, ring it once while he is standing at the counter, and write a landmark for the house beside it. Add a second person who can always be reached. Then fix it whenever a call fails, in ten seconds, instead of leaving it for the day you badly need it.

The number that stopped working

A page has been open for five months. Rs 22,000. The man used to come every week, then every second week, then not at all.

You finally decide to call. The number rings once and a recording tells you it does not exist. You try the register again in case you misread a digit, then ask two customers, and one of them thinks he moved somewhere near the bus stand.

Now the balance is not a collection problem. It is a search problem, and searching costs days you do not have. The money did not become hard to recover the month he stopped paying. It became hard to recover the day his number changed and nobody wrote the new one down.

Say a page sits at Rs 22,000 and the number has stopped working

Balance on the pageRs 22,000

Time it takes to find him again: shops, neighbours, his workplace3 to 4 days

What those days are worth if the shop runs short-handedRs 4,000

Time taking the number properly on day one would have cost40 seconds

What forty seconds was worthRs 26,000 at risk

This is the cheapest loss in a shop to prevent, and it is the one nobody spends five minutes on.

Take the details when the credit starts, not later

There is exactly one moment when a customer will happily give you his number: the moment he is asking you to write something in his name. He wants the credit, you are being careful, and being careful is reassuring.

Three weeks later that same request feels like suspicion, and six months later, when the balance is large and he is late, asking sounds like an accusation.

So make it part of opening the page, in the same breath as the amount. "Name, number, and where the house is. That is how the khata opens here." Nobody argues with a rule that applied to the man in front of him.

The same logic runs through how much udhaar to give: the careful part is done at the start, cheaply, while everybody is pleased with each other.

Ring it while he is standing there

A written number is a claim. A number that rang in front of you is a fact.

So dial it at the counter. His phone buzzes in his pocket, you both smile at the small ceremony of it, and you save yourself a serious problem later. It takes four seconds and it catches three different mistakes at once: a digit you misheard, a digit he said wrong, and a number that was never his.

Then send one short message from that same phone, so he has your number too. Now the road runs both ways. The customer who has your number in his phone is the customer who messages you when he is going to be late, instead of quietly avoiding your street.

If somebody refuses to give a working number while asking for credit, you have not lost anything. You have been told something early, at zero cost, and you can offer him the same goods for cash without any argument at all.

A second person, and where he actually lives

One number is not enough for a page that will run for months. Two things make a real difference.

A second contact. A son, a brother, a wife, a partner at his own shop. Not a guarantor, and you must not present it as one: just "somebody else I can reach if your phone is off". Most people give it without a thought, because it costs them nothing and they know their own phone breaks.

A landmark, not an address. In most streets a written address is useless anyway. What works is the sentence a rickshaw driver would understand: "green gate opposite the water tank, behind the flour mill". If he has a shop or a workplace, that is often better than a house, because a workplace does not move at night.

What goes on the page the day a khata opens

• His own number, dialled once at the counter so you both hear it ring
• A second person who can always be reached, named as a contact and not a guarantor
• A landmark, not an address: the sentence a rickshaw driver would follow
• Where he works, and the day he is usually paid
• Your own number sent to him, so the road runs both ways
• Whose number it is, if he gives you somebody else's

Write his work too. "Drives a van for the fruit market" tells you when he has money, when he is likely to be reachable, and where somebody would know him. It also helps you match his payment day to his income day, which quietly prevents half of all late payments.

Numbers rot, so refresh them without making a project of it

People change numbers constantly, and nobody announces it to their shopkeeper. If you wait for a tidy-up day, that day never comes.

Do it in small pieces instead, using moments that already happen:

When a call does not connect, fix the number before you put the phone down, even if you reach him some other way an hour later. This is the same five-second discipline that keeps regular customers from turning into strangers. When a customer clears a big balance, that is a happy moment: "Is this still your number?" takes five seconds. When he mentions moving house, write the new landmark then and there, because you will not remember it in a month.

And once in a while, when the shop is quiet, take the ten largest open pages and check just those. Ten calls is not a project, and those ten names are where nearly all of your risk sits anyway.

The customers who are hardest to reach are usually the ones who owe the most, which is not a coincidence. That is also why when a customer disappears starts with what you should have written down long before he vanished.

When the number is already dead

Sometimes you are reading this too late and the number is gone. Work through it in order, calmly, and stop as soon as something works.

Try the second contact if you have one. Ask the neighbouring shopkeepers who serve the same street, without saying what he owes, because his balance stays private even when he is avoiding you. Ask a customer who came with him the first time, if you remember one. Go to the workplace rather than the house, because people are found at work.

If you reach him, do not start with the money. Start with the number: "I could not reach you, give me the current one." Fix the record first, then talk about the balance. A man who has just given you a working number has taken a small step back towards you, and the conversation about payment goes better after it.

Then stop the page from growing while it is unreachable. No new credit until there is a number that rings. Say that plainly, without anger, and it is rarely argued with.

Where these details should actually live

A number scribbled in the margin of a register page is safe until the page is full, the register is replaced, or the ink runs. Then it is gone.

A digital khata keeps the number attached to the customer, not to a page, so it survives everything and travels with the balance. In Wasoolo the customer's number sits on his own record with his entries and payments, and searching by name or number finds him in a second, which matters on a busy counter when the man in front of you is somebody you have not seen in months.

The one-tap WhatsApp button uses that same number: it opens a chat with the customer, with his balance ready, and you send the message yourself. A number that has never been tried is a number that quietly stopped working; a number you actually message every month is a number you notice the day it fails.

Backup does the last part. Phones are lost and dropped, and a shop that loses its phone loses every number it ever collected unless the record lives somewhere beyond it.

Common questions

Some customers do not want to give a number at all. What do I do?

Offer the same goods for cash, with no argument and no lecture. Credit and contact go together, and that is a rule about the shop rather than a judgement about him. Most people give the number once they see the alternative is simply paying today.

How do I ask an old customer for his number without insulting him?

Attach it to something happy, not to a late payment. When he clears a balance, ask casually while you write: "Is this still your number?" It reads as tidying the record, which is exactly what it is. Asking on the day he is late is what feels like an accusation.

Is a second contact the same as a guarantor?

No, and be careful to say so plainly. A guarantor promises to pay if the customer does not, in his own words and usually in writing. A second contact is just a way to reach the person. If you blur the two, the second man will feel tricked when you call him, and he will tell everybody in the street about it.

A customer gave me his son's number instead of his own. Is that a problem?

It is fine as long as you write whose number it is. Trouble only starts when the record says one man's name and the number quietly belongs to somebody else, so a reminder reaches a person who was never told about the balance. Write "son's number" beside it and take the customer's own as well if he has one.

How often should I check numbers?

Never as a big project, because that never happens. Check when a call fails, when a large page is cleared, and when somebody mentions moving. Then, whenever the shop is quiet, run through the ten biggest open balances. That handles most of your risk with about ten minutes of work.

What if he has moved to another city entirely?

Get whatever you can while somebody still remembers him: the new city, the work he went for, the name of whoever told you. Then treat the balance realistically. Ask for small fixed payments by transfer rather than a lump sum, keep messaging politely on any number that works, and stop new credit. Distance does not cancel a debt, but it does change the size of payment that will actually arrive.