The account sheet: the fixed facts about a café you keep re-asking

The fact you had and can't find

You're at the van, boxes stacked, and you can't remember which door this café takes deliveries through. Front, or the service entrance round the side? They told you once, back when you started. So you stand there and scroll: up through weeks of messages about this week's order, last week's short delivery, the day they skipped, until somewhere near the top there's the line where they said go round the back, ring the bell by the bins. You had the fact. You just kept it in the one place it was hard to get at.

It happens mid-invoice too. You're billing an account and you need the exact name the invoice has to carry, because the trading name over the door isn't the name that pays, and if you put the wrong one the invoice bounces back with a query and sits unpaid another week. That name exists. It's in the thread, somewhere, from the day they set you up.

I ran between five and ten trade accounts on my own: growing, packing, delivering, invoicing, all of it. Orders and changes arrived across scattered messages, not as one list. What I didn't notice at the time is that the account's own details lived in that same scatter. The order changed often enough that I expected to go digging for it. The fixed facts never changed, so I never thought to write them down, and then I went digging for those too.

Three documents, and most of us build two

A producer keeps three kinds of record for a trade account, whether or not they'd call them that.

The price list says what a buyer can order from you, and at what price. It faces outward, to the café. The one-page wholesale price list is the version a kitchen can order from cold.

The run sheet says what goes in the box this week: who gets what, in what order you drop it. The one-page run sheet is the thing you carry in the van and bin on Friday.

Both of those feel like work you have to sit down and do. The third one doesn't, which is how it goes missing. The account sheet records the fixed facts about each account: where it is, who to talk to, how they order, when they pay. Those don't feel like a document. They feel like things you just know. And you do know them, right up until you're covering a round while ill, or you've taken on enough accounts that the details for the newest one haven't settled into your head yet. Then you're scrolling again.

What goes on it

One account per row. The fields are the questions you end up re-asking:

• Delivery day and window. The day they want it and the time it has to be there by. Not "mornings" but the actual deadline the kitchen works to.
• The drop-off point. The real one. Front door, side door, through the café and into the kitchen, the buzzer that works versus the one that doesn't. Any access quirk you had to be told once.
• Who receives. The person who takes the delivery and knows what was ordered. Often not the owner.
• Who pays. The person or address the invoice goes to, which is frequently someone you never see on delivery.
• How they order, and by when. WhatsApp to this number, a call on Sunday, an email by Thursday lunchtime. Your cut-off for them.
• Pack size and price. What you've agreed with this account. It may not match your list price if you settled something when they signed on.
• Payment terms. Seven days, thirty days, on delivery. What was agreed, so you know when a bill is actually late.
• The invoice name and email. The exact legal or trading name that has to appear for it to get paid without a query, and the address it goes to.

Most of these are the things a kitchen expects a supplier to simply have. I spent about a decade on the other side of that order, the person receiving from producers, and a supplier who has the right door and the right invoice name reads as someone who has their act together. One who re-asks the delivery instructions reads as someone you have to manage. Same product, different impression, and the difference is a sheet.

Why it's not just a line on the run sheet

The temptation is to cram this onto the run sheet, since that's the page you already carry. Don't. The run sheet changes every week and gets thrown out. The fixed facts change rarely and you keep them. Put them on the same page and the fixed facts get thrown out with the weekly list, so you never build them up into anything, so you're back in the thread.

Keep them apart and each does one job. The run sheet answers "what goes in the box this morning". The account sheet answers "everything about this account that was true last month and will be true next month". You read the account sheet when you set up the run, or when you sit down to invoice, not while you're packing.

The handover test

One test tells you whether your sheet is complete. Could someone else do your delivery round from it, with no other input? Could someone else send out this week's invoices from it, and get them all paid?

If the answer is no, the gaps are exactly the fields that currently live only in your head or in the thread. The door you'd have to explain over the phone. The invoice name you'd have to go and check. Write those in. A sheet that passes the handover test is a sheet you can also hand to yourself on a bad morning, which is most of what it's for.

Keeping it true

A record like this earns its place only when it is right, and the facts do move: a new contact when someone leaves, a changed delivery day, a price you renegotiated in the spring. The habit is to update the one sheet the moment it changes, rather than carrying the change in your head until you forget it. One line, crossed out and rewritten, at the point you agree it. That is the whole discipline.

A small sheet makes this a small job. The cost of not doing it is that the sheet quietly stops being true, and an untrue sheet sends you back to the thread to double-check, which is the thing you built it to stop.

A layout you can build this week

Nothing software is needed for this. A notebook page turned sideways, or a single spreadsheet tab, one row per account:

Account | Deliv. day/by | Drop-off + access | Receives | Orders how/by | Pack & price | Terms | Invoice name + email | Pays

Fill a row the day you take a new account on, while they're telling you all of it anyway, because the start is the one time every fixed fact gets said out loud at once. Fill the existing ones from memory where you can, and from the thread where you have to, once, so you never have to go back.

If you keep your orders and invoicing in makeweek, the account's details can sit in one place alongside them rather than in a chat thread, which saves the scroll. The sheet is the point, though, not where you keep it. On paper it works.

Write the fixed facts down once, per account, somewhere that isn't the message thread. Then the next time you're at the van wondering which door, or mid-invoice wondering which name, you look at one line instead of scrolling back through a month to find the day they told you.