The khata entry whose customer you cannot name

A balance with a first name and no phone number is a customer problem, not a maths problem. Work back from the date, the goods and the entries around it, ask the men it could be without accusing them, and open every customer once so no entry is ever homeless.

The line that has lost its person

It is a quarter past nine on a slow morning and you are going through the register to see who owes what. Four pages back, in your own handwriting: Aslam, Rs 3,400, and beside it, flour, oil, tea, sugar. No phone number. No street.

You know three men called Aslam. One repairs motorcycles two lanes down. One came in for two months while the plaza behind the market was being built. One is the electrician whose daughter you sometimes see buying eggs.

The money is real. The customer is not. This is not an arithmetic mistake; the addition is perfect. What has gone missing is the link between a number and a human being who can be found.

It happens to careful shopkeepers, not careless ones

The entry is short because you were fast, and you were fast because a queue was forming. Your hand had time for a first name, because the face was standing in front of you and the face was the record. Eight weeks later the face is gone and the page keeps four letters.

Careless shopkeepers do not get this in large amounts, because they do not write much down. It belongs to the ones who write everything, quickly, all day.

A helper makes it worse. He writes people the way he knows them, not the way you do. Your book collects "Aslam" from you and "the man with the white van" from him, and neither line means anything to the other person. It is the same crack that opens when two people write in one khata without an agreed format.

The other source is the entry written from memory after the customer has left. Memory hands you the amount and drops the rest, which makes it a cousin of the sale you forget to write at all.

What a nameless balance actually costs

The Rs 3,400 is the small part. You may even get it back one day.

The real cost is that the number is still sitting inside your total.

Say your register shows Rs 96,000 of open udhaar

Total open udhaar in the bookRs 96,000

Standing against customers you can reachRs 88,600

Standing against a first name and nothing elseRs 7,400

Entries in that second group6

What your buying and your credit should be planned fromRs 88,600

You are not simply out Rs 7,400. You are running a shop from a total that is wrong in your own favour, which is the dangerous direction. You order stock you cannot pay for. You give credit to a stranger because the book says you have room. You promise your supplier a date you cannot make.

A balance you cannot collect is manageable while you know it is there, which is the ordinary problem of udhaar that has sat for a long time. One you cannot attach to anybody is worse, because it is still being counted as money that will come in.

One evening of putting a face back on the line

Do not start by asking people. Asking is the last step, and the only one that can cost you a customer.

One evening of putting a face back on the line

1. 1Start with the date, and the day of the week it fell onA delivery day, a market day, the morning the school reopened. The day tells you who was in the shop at all.
2. 2Read the goods on that line, not the amountTwelve kilos of flour with a large tin of oil is a house of seven. One razor and a phone card is a man living on his own.
3. 3Read the entries above and below itThey were written inside the same hour. Those customers stood beside your man, and in most streets they live near him too.
4. 4Ask whoever was on the counter that dayA helper remembers people by the van, the dog, the child they send. Ask him to describe the customer, not to name him.
5. 5Open the delivery register and the old order slipsAnything that went to a house carries an address somewhere. So does a slip written for an order collected later.
6. 6Look at your own phone around that dateCalls, messages, a transfer received. A customer who took Rs 3,400 of goods usually rang you at least once.
7. 7Only then, ask the two or three it could beOne at a time, on separate days, in an empty shop. Never as a group, and never where a customer can hear.

The two skipped steps are the strongest. The entries above and below yours were written inside the same hour, so those customers stood in your shop at nearly the same moment, and in most streets they live near each other. Ask one of them rather than your suspect. "Four months back, on a Thursday, was there an Aslam in here when you came for your oil?" People remember who stood beside them.

And the goods talk. Twelve kilos of flour, a large tin of oil and a quarter of tea is a household of eight. One razor, a phone card and a bar of soap is a man living alone, gone the day his job ended. That reading alone cuts three men down to one.

How to ask without accusing anyone

Half the time, or more, you are about to ask the wrong person, and the wrong person will remember it for years.

At six in the evening Rafiq, the electrician, comes in for a light fitting. The shop is empty apart from him. This is the moment, and the words matter more than anything else on this page.

Asking the man it might be

✓Say this

• I am tidying up my old pages and there is one line I cannot place. Could it be yours?
• It was a Thursday, about four months back. Flour, oil, tea and sugar together. Does that sound like your house?
• That is fine, my mistake. Sorry to have troubled you.
• Ask him alone, when the shop is empty, and ask only once.

✕Never this

• You owe me Rs 3,400 from four months back.
• Somebody took goods and never paid. Was it you?
• Are you sure? Think about it properly.
• Asking all three of them together, or where another customer can hear.

The good version makes your register the problem rather than the man. It leads with the goods and the date instead of the amount, because if the balance is his, the goods will remind him. And it leaves him an easy way out, which an honest customer needs and a dishonest one rarely takes.

Ask one at a time, on separate days, never where another customer can hear. If a man says no, accept it completely and say so out loud. Being asked once, politely, in an empty shop costs nothing; being asked twice costs you the customer.

If somebody says yes, read the line out to him, thank him, and settle it like any other balance. If he disputes the amount, that is a normal khata disagreement, and there are calmer ways to finish it.

Knowing when to stop, and how to close it

Give the whole thing one evening and one round of asking. That is the rule, and it belongs on the inside cover of your register.

An unidentifiable balance is worth as much of your time as it would take you to earn the same money at the counter, and not an hour more. Three days spent chasing Rs 3,400 has already cost you more than Rs 3,400.

When the evening is over and the line is still homeless, close it properly. Do not scratch it out, and do not leave it rotting in the total. Write a closing line, dated the day you write it, in words a stranger could follow: "Closed. Customer not identifiable. Rs 3,400 taken out of the total." Leave the original line above it, untouched.

Your total becomes true again, which was the point. And if the man does walk in one day, the record is still there and you pick it straight back up.

The customer is the record, not the entry

Everything above is repair work. Here is the change that means you never do it again.

Stop treating the entry as the record. An entry is goods and an amount. The record is the person, and a person is opened once, properly, the day he first takes credit.

Three fields do nearly all the work.

A phone number. It beats everything else and it is not close. It is the only thing about a customer that is truly unique, because two men called Aslam never share a number. It survives him moving house, changing work and your helper leaving, and he hands it over without thinking.

A landmark, not an address. "Lane behind the flour mill, blue gate." Nobody in your market uses a postal address, and a landmark is what a delivery boy can follow.

The way your shop really refers to him. "Aslam, electrician." Not what is printed on his identity card. That phrase is what you and your helper will both search for at the counter.

Once the person exists, writing a sale takes three seconds. You are dropping goods and an amount onto somebody already there. That is how Wasoolo works: a customer is opened once, with his number and whatever else you want to remember, and every entry after that lands on his own page. A balance belonging to nobody cannot be created, because the person is picked before the amount is written.

Start from the day you are standing in

The register you already have is full of first names. Leave it alone.

Do not spend a week going backwards to fix history. It is slow, dull work, and most of those balances will settle by themselves within a few weeks anyway.

Fix the day you are standing in. From tomorrow morning, no new entry goes into the book against a person who does not already exist, with a number beside him. That one rule stops the problem growing while you sleep.

Then pick names off the old page at the counter as they come. The best moment to ask a first-name customer for his number is the moment he pays you. He is standing right there, pleased with himself, and "let me put your number down so I can send you your statement" is an ordinary thing to say. Regular customers stay regular when asking feels like service instead of suspicion.

Give the old page a deadline anyway. Eight weeks. Whatever is still nameless by then gets one evening of tracing, or gets closed with a reason beside it.

Common questions

I have twenty old entries with only a first name. Should I fix them all?

No. Sort them by amount instead. Anything larger than a day's takings is worth one evening of tracing. Watch the rest for a few weeks: most of those customers walk back in and identify themselves by paying you.

What if the man I ask agrees to something that was never his?

It happens with older customers who do not want to look forgetful. That is why you lead with the goods and the date, not the amount. Read the line out exactly as it stands: the day, the four items, the total. Politeness backs away once it gets that specific.

Should I refuse udhaar to a customer who will not give me his number?

For a stranger's first credit, yes, and without feeling bad about it. A man who leaves no way of reaching him has told you something useful. For a customer of fifteen years, no: take the number from his son, or from an old delivery slip.

My helper writes most of the entries. How do I make him take numbers?

Give him one fixed rule instead of a lecture: the person before the amount. If the customer is not in the book, the number is taken before the line is written. Make it fast: a rule costing thirty seconds at a busy counter is broken by the second day. In Wasoolo the customer and his number are saved in about the time the line takes by hand.

The customer changes his phone number. Then what?

Update it on the person, not on the entry. That is the practical advantage of keeping the customer as the record: one correction fixes every balance he has ever had, backwards and forwards. Keep the old number written under the new one for a few months.

What about a customer who never gives a real name at all?

Then the landmark and the description carry the load, so write more of them, not less. "Tall, white van, buys for the tea stall by the bus stop" identifies a man better than a name you cannot trust. Ask for the number at his second or third visit.