Getting paid: how print shops in Nepal lose money on credit
Unpaid credit is money you have already spent on paper and ink. It is the number worth getting right before any other.
Ask a print shop owner what they worry about and very few say order tracking. They say the notebook. The one with the party names down the left and the amounts down the right, some of them circled, one of them from last Dashain.
Credit is not the problem. Credit is how business is done here, and a shop that refuses it loses its best customers to one that does not. The problem is that the record of it is usually the weakest thing in the shop.
Why the dues number goes wrong
The same customer, written three ways
Ram Traders. Ram Traders Pvt. RAM traders. One customer, three rows, and the total owed is split across all of them. Nobody sees the real figure because the real figure was never in one place.
This is worth fixing first, and it is fixable in an afternoon: pick one spelling per customer and put the phone number beside it. The number is what makes two spellings obviously the same person.
Part payments that nobody subtracted
A customer pays रु 2,000 against a रु 5,000 job. The 2,000 goes in the drawer. The notebook still says 5,000, or it says 3,000 but only in one of the two places the customer appears.
The job that was never billed at all
Rush work, done as a favour, delivered on a Friday. Real paper, real ink, real hours, and no line anywhere that says it happened.
What good looks like
A shop with its dues under control can answer three questions without hesitating:
- What is the total owed to this shop right now?
- Which customer owes the most, and since when?
- For any single customer, which specific jobs are unpaid?
The third one is what makes the conversation easy. "You owe रु 18,000" invites an argument. "These four jobs from Bhadra are still open, here they are" does not.
On chasing payment without being unpleasant
The shops that collect best are not the ones that chase hardest. They are the ones whose records are obviously right, so the customer never suspects they are being overcharged and never has a reason to stall.
A printed record given at delivery does more for collection than any reminder sent afterwards. The customer leaves with the same number you have.