What a day close looks like at nine at night

Every distributor has a version of this scene. It is past eight. The van is back. The delivery man has a bag of cash, a few cheques, a bundle of invoices with pen marks on them, and a memory of which shop said pay me Thursday. The distributor's clerk has a ledger, a calculator and the load sheet from the morning.

What follows takes an hour on a good night and three on a bad one. Loaded stock minus sold stock should equal what is on the van. Cash plus credit plus cheques should equal what was delivered. It never quite does, and the difference is settled by argument, memory and a note for tomorrow.

Where the day actually goes wrong

• An order was booked at one price and delivered at another, because the scheme changed at lunchtime and one phone did not get the message.
• A return was accepted at the shop and nobody wrote it down until the van was unloaded.
• A credit sale was recorded as cash, or the other way round, and the customer's balance is now wrong in a way nobody will notice for a month.
• The rep who booked the orders is not there, so the delivery man is guessing which shop is which.

What changes when the day is closed on a phone

In Targets the day is closed in three steps on the delivery user's phone, and the app is locked until they are done. First the accounts summary: total sale, cash, credit and cheque, productive against non-productive visits. Then the van inventory: what was loaded, what was sold, what is coming back, in cartons and pieces. Then the review, with a photograph of the bank deposit slip.

Each number in that summary was recorded at the moment it happened. The delivery was settled at the shop counter as cash, credit or cheque. The return was booked by the rep and confirmed by a manager before it counted. The scheme was applied by the system from head office's chart, so it was the same on every phone.

The distributor's clerk at nine at night

Opens the daily sales report. Everything the van did is already there, reconciled against the load sheet. The clerk's job becomes checking, not reconstructing. The argument about the missing carton happens with the data on the screen instead of from memory, and it usually ends in two minutes.

Nothing is left for tomorrow, because tomorrow starts with a load sheet built from tonight's closing stock.

If your distributors close their days from memory, that is the place to start. Not because the month end is wrong, but because the month end is made of thirty of these nights.