The morning: what needs you

Running a cash-and-carry that delivers to corner shops means three kinds of trouble arrive every morning: goods that must go out, money that has not come in, and stock that is about to run out. Most owners find these on three different screens, or in three different people's heads. This tour shows the owner's 7am look at Home, where all three sit on one page in the order they need dealing with.

Step by step

1. Open Home at the start of the day. The first thing you see is one summary line. In the tour it reads: three orders to deliver, two payments overdue, two products running low. Before you scroll, you know how heavy the morning is. That line is deliberately short; it is a count, not a report.

2. Read the "needs you" list from the top. Under the summary, deliveries, late payers and low stock are mixed into a single list, most urgent first. A delivery due this morning sits above a payment that is four days late, which sits above a product with five days left. The reason for one list instead of three tabs is simple: things hidden on another page do not get done.

3. Look at the deliveries due today. Each order to deliver shows the shop and the order. If one of them has not been picked yet, this is the moment to ask the warehouse why, while the van is still in the yard.

4. Check the two late payers. Each one shows how many days late it is and how much is owed, with the biggest risk at the top. In the tour's sample, one shop owes £1,180.40 and is 12 days past due; another owes £342.60 and is four days late. The bigger, older debt is the first call.

5. Check what is running low. Cola shows about two days left. That figure comes from how fast cola has been selling, so it already allows for a busy week. If the supplier takes two days to deliver, two days left means the order goes in today, not tomorrow.

6. Glance at how the business is going. On the right, a soft chart compares sales today with yesterday and shows the week so far. You are not analysing anything at 7am. You are checking that nothing looks badly wrong, such as a day with no sales recorded at all, which usually means a till or a rep has not synced.

7. See who owes, by age. Below the chart, money owed is split into not due, a little late and very late. A growing very-late band is the early warning that credit control needs time this week.

8. Act on the list, then leave Home. Hand the deliveries to the warehouse, the late payers to whoever does credit control and the low stock to the buyer. Home is the start of the morning, not where the work is done.

What Home shows and what to do about it

Why days left matters more than quantity

A shelf count on its own misleads. In the tour's sample, there are 38 cases of cola and 140 cases of still water. The water looks like the bigger worry only if you ignore the rate of sale. Cola is selling fast enough that 38 cases is about two days. The water, at its rate, has about nine. A reorder point based only on a fixed number would treat both the same way.

If you want to set reorder points properly, our guide to the reorder point shows the sum: daily sales multiplied by the supplier's lead time, plus a safety margin. The reorder point calculator does it for you.

Tips for the morning check

• Do it before you answer the phone. Five quiet minutes with Home sets the order of the day. Once calls start, the loudest customer sets it instead.
• Treat the summary line as a trend. If "payments overdue" says two every day for a month, that is fine. If it creeps from two to six, credit terms are slipping.
• Hand things over by name. "The cola needs ordering today" is better than "have a look at stock".
• Check the chart at the same time each day. A comparison at 7am against yesterday at 7am is fair; against yesterday's full day it is not.

Common mistakes

Reading the list and doing nothing with it. Home tells you what needs you. If nobody is named against each item, the same items will be there tomorrow.

Chasing the newest late payer first. A shop four days late usually pays this week anyway. The one 12 days late with a bigger balance is the real risk.

Reordering by gut instead of days left. Owners often reorder the product they remember selling, not the one that is actually running out.

Ignoring an empty sales day. A zero on the chart is rarely a quiet day. It is more often a till, a rep's phone or an import that did not run.

How the morning connects to the rest of the day

Every item on Home leads to one of the other tours in the wholesale day. Deliveries were picked earlier on the warehouse phone and go out with the driver later. Late payers lead to credit control in the afternoon, where reminders go out on a schedule. Low stock leads to a reorder with a draft purchase order, and the lorry that brings it is checked in at goods in. In the evening, the day close and the weekly reports show whether the morning's plan worked.

What to do next

If late payments are the item that shows up most mornings, read our guide to customer credit for wholesalers, which covers setting limits and terms you can enforce. For a broader view of where money goes between selling and being paid, see cash flow for small business. And if you are still setting the business up, how to start a wholesale business explains the routines worth building from day one.