Not long after I opened this morning, a regular of seven or eight years took three cases of goods, dug through her bag, and said she had left her phone at home — she would settle up tomorrow. Fine, I said, and pulled out the notebook: name, date, amount.
There aren’t many entries in that notebook — a few dozen a year, and most are struck out the next day. I keep it not because I am afraid of losing the money, but because in this trade credit is part of the business. People come early to restock without enough cash on them; the goods go out first and are settled at night. Refuse credit and they go elsewhere tomorrow.
But I have slowly come to see that the hard part of credit is not the money.
Whether I extend it, and how much, I never decide by how close we are. I look at something else: in all these years, has this person ever gotten a figure wrong, ever put a payment off? People whose numbers add up and whose dates hold get a higher limit, naturally. It sounds cold, but it is the fairest method there is — it doesn’t care how sweet you talk, or how long we have known each other.
The most common kind of trouble is not someone refusing to pay. It is someone turning credit into a test. They open with “You don’t trust me?” or “After all these years.” One sentence, and a business transaction becomes a moral referendum: refuse credit and you are looking down on me. The moment that is said, I know the account will be hard to collect. Not because they will certainly default — because from then on the debt cannot be mentioned. Mention it, and it becomes “You actually kept track?” Before much money is owed, the goodwill has already been put up as collateral.
And goodwill pledged like that is ugliest when it can’t be redeemed. The money you can write off; the face you can’t. So many people would rather not mention it at all and let the entry rot on the page. What rots isn’t the money. It’s the little room you would otherwise have had to reach out next time.
Then there are the ones who make me embarrassed. One woman always paid earlier than agreed: promised Friday, and the money arrived Thursday afternoon, with two catties of her own pickled radish. I joked that she was so punctual I felt awkward writing her down. Write it, she said. It’s only when you write it that I feel settled.
I have remembered that line ever since. What she wanted was not my trust; it was a clear edge to the account. Trust is vague. An edge is real. It is the people with no edge in mind who need to keep asking, “Do you trust me?”
So now when I extend credit I say it up front: how much, how many days, and then I write it down. It looks like closing the conversation off; really it leaves it a way through. The unpleasant terms come first, and when the day arrives I can say “that account” without either of us flushing. Without the paper, my reminder sounds like suspicion and their delay sounds like betrayal, and a fifty-yuan entry grows a layer of resentment. Run a small business long enough and you learn that squaring the books isn’t a lack of feeling — it is what leaves feeling somewhere to retreat to. Goodwill cannot survive being calculated, but it can survive being stated.
There was one I never collected. Two years ago a man working out of town owed a bit over six hundred and kept saying next week on the phone. Eventually I stopped calling. That line is still in the notebook with a pencil circle around it. What is circled is not six hundred yuan; it is one time I misjudged a person. The money I can let go. The lesson I keep.
The notebook has another use. The writing is mine: scrawled when we are busy, neat when it is quiet, and flipping back I can see how frantic that day was. A spreadsheet is clean — clean enough that there is nothing to see. For anyone in small trade long enough, the record of dealing with people is a ledger too, and the scrawled pages are usually the ones you remember best.
This afternoon the regular came back, put the money down, and said she had been thinking about it on the way home yesterday. I struck out the line, lightly. Every line in that notebook gets struck out sooner or later. What I fear is not the ones I can’t strike out — it is the day I don’t dare write a new one.
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