The one-page run sheet: what actually goes in each box this morning
A product-free, build-it-by-hand one-page pick-and-deliver run sheet for a small-batch trade producer: one row per customer, packed in delivery order, a change column and a total to tick against. Distinguishes it from the production plan and the price list. Grounded in the microgreens experience (packing and delivering off scattered messages, five-to-ten accounts); no figures beyond that range, as none are recorded and no research or applications with notes were attached. Wanted a real anecdote of a wrong box going to the wrong café but none is in the ledger, so kept it general.
Six in the morning, and nothing to pack against
The boxes are stacked empty on the table. The van is cold outside. And the only record of what goes where is a phone: this week's orders spread across a dozen messages, some of them a fortnight old, one of them a voice note I have not listened back to.
So I pack from memory. I know roughly who takes what. I start filling boxes, and somewhere around the third one I stop, because I cannot remember whether that café asked for the extra tray this week or the week before. I scroll back through the thread to check. Boxes half-filled, cold van, scrolling.
When I was doing this, growing microgreens and running the deliveries myself across somewhere between five and ten accounts, that table was where the day went wrong before it had started. Not because I was disorganised in the abstract. Because there was no single list to pack against. The orders existed. They just did not exist anywhere I could pack from.
Three documents, and the one everyone skips
There are three different sheets in a wholesale week, and it is easy to think you have all three when you only have two.
The first is the production plan: what you have to make, and how much. I have written before about a production plan you will actually keep up to date, and that document does one job, which is telling you what to grow, bake or brew before the week starts.
The second is the price list: what a buyer is allowed to order and on what terms. That is the one-page price list a café can order from cold. It faces outward, at the customer.
The third is the one almost nobody writes down, because it feels like something you just know. It is the sheet that says, this morning, exactly what goes in each customer's box, and in what order you load the van. Call it a run sheet. The production plan told you to make a hundred somethings. The price list told the café what a something costs. Neither one tells you that this box, the one in your hands, is the café on the far side of town and it needs two trays not three.
That gap is where the wrong box goes to the wrong drop.
What earns a place on the sheet
A run sheet does not need to be clever. It needs four things.
One row per customer. Not per product, per customer, because you pack one box at a time and each box is one drop.
What they get this week, written next to their name. The settled version, not "same as last week" and not the message thread it came from.
The rows in delivery order. This is the part that saves you at the van. If the sheet is ordered the way you drive, first drop at the top, last drop at the bottom, then you load the van back to front: last drop goes in first, first drop sits by the doors. You are not climbing over the whole load at every stop.
And a box to tick. One per row. You tick it when that box is packed and in the van. When every row is ticked, you are done, and you know you are done rather than hoping.
Settle it the night before, not while you pack
The mistake I made for too long was building the list and packing the boxes as one job, at six in the morning, with the van running. That is the worst possible time to be reading old messages and doing sums.
The run sheet is a separate job, and it belongs the night before. Sit down with the phone and turn the scattered messages into one settled list while nothing is on fire. Go through each account, decide what they are actually getting, and write the row. If a message is ambiguous, that is the moment to send "so that's two trays for Thursday, yes?" and get the answer before morning, not to guess at six and find out you were wrong at the drop.
I have written separately about why orders scattered across chat threads are not an order book. The run sheet is what you get when you finally sit down and turn them into one.
Doing it the night before also means the morning is dumb work. Read a row, fill a box, tick it. No decisions, no scrolling, no memory. That is the whole point.
The change column
Standing orders rarely stand. Mine never did. "Recurring" was a word I kept true by hand, because someone always wanted an extra tray this week, or to skip because they were closed Monday, or to swap one thing for another.
Those changes are where the sheet is worth most, and only if you write them down the moment they arrive. So give the sheet a change column. When a café messages "can I get an extra tray this Thursday", it goes in the change column against their row, once, straight away. When someone says "skip me next week", same thing.
The reason is simple. A change that lives only in your head has a short life. You will remember it for an hour, maybe a day, and then a busier thing lands on top of it and it is gone. Written against the row, it is still there when you build the sheet, and it packs itself.
A total you can pack against
At the bottom of the sheet, add the thing up. If the sheet says four trays here, two there, three somewhere else, then the total is the number of trays that should leave the table. Nine.
Now you have a check that costs nothing. Before you close the van, the trays you packed should match the total on the sheet. If the sheet says nine and you count eight in the van, you are missing one, and you find out in the yard rather than at the third drop with a café owner standing there. The total is what turns "I think that's everything" into "that's everything."
The layout
Here is the whole thing. It fits on one side of paper.
RUN SHEET — [day / date]
Order Customer This week Change Packed
1 [drop 1] [what they get] [extra / skip] [ ]
2 [drop 2] [what they get] [extra / skip] [ ]
3 [drop 3] [what they get] [extra / skip] [ ]
...
TOTAL: [___] [ ]
Six columns, and you will not use all of them every week. The order number and customer never change. "This week" is the settled order. "Change" is where the one-offs live. "Packed" is the tick. The total sits at the foot.
Build it in a notebook if that is what is by the kettle. Rule the columns once, photocopy a stack, fill one in each week. Build it in a spreadsheet if you would rather, one tab per week, so last week's is still there when someone argues about what they ordered. It needs no software at all. It is a list with the columns in the right order.
Where software earns its place is the job before the sheet: turning a week of messages into that settled list without you copying each one out by hand. That is the part makeweek is built for, taking the orders as they arrive and giving you one list to pack from. But the sheet itself is yours, and it works in biro.
The real test of a run sheet is not whether it looks tidy. It is whether you could hand it to someone else on a morning you cannot do the run, a bad back or a sick child, and they could pack the boxes and drive the drops without ringing you once. If the sheet holds every answer they would otherwise have to ask you for, it is doing its job. If they would still need to phone you halfway round, it is not finished yet, and the missing bit is usually the thing you were carrying in your head.