Selling on credit without the bad debts

The stone trade runs on trust and credit. A buyer takes stone today and pays over weeks — that's not a flaw in the business, it's the business. But credit given without control is where a good year quietly becomes an average one.

The goal isn't to stop extending credit. It's to always know exactly how much you've extended, to whom, and to make sure goods never move on a promise you can't see.

Know your exposure — to the rupee

Exposure is the total a customer owes you across every open order. On paper, that number lives in someone's head or scattered across pages, which means at the exact moment you decide whether to give more credit, you're guessing.

The discipline: before you reserve more stone for a buyer, look at what they already owe across everything. A running total per customer turns "he's good for it" into a number you can actually weigh.

A credit limit makes that judgment repeatable. Set a ceiling per customer; when a new order would push their total exposure past it, you get a warning. Not a hard stop — you know your buyers, and a trusted, long-standing customer is a conscious exception. But an exception you make on purpose, seeing the number, is very different from one you make blind.

Money before goods move

The single most protective rule in a yard is simple: nothing leaves until a payment is confirmed. No processing, no dispatch, no truck at the gate on an unpaid order.

This isn't about distrust. It's about removing the gap where losses live — the order that shipped "just this once" as a favour and became a six-month chase. When the rule is absolute and applies to everyone, no one has to be the person who says no. The system says it.

The related discipline: never let the "paid" figure be a number someone typed. It should always be the sum of the actual payments recorded against the order, so the money and the goods can never drift apart.

When a return becomes credit

Returns and overpayments are where money quietly vanishes. A customer returns stone, the maths gets fuzzy, and a few thousand rupees evaporate in the confusion.

The clean way: any surplus a customer is owed becomes store credit — a tracked balance on their account that spends like cash on their next order. Nothing is refunded in a panic, nothing is forgotten, and the customer's money stays the customer's money until they use it. Handled carefully, repeat returns can never double-count that credit.

Collections without the awkward call

The hardest part of credit is asking for it back. Which is why most overdue balances sit longer than they should — the phone call is uncomfortable, so it doesn't happen.

Two things make collections easier:

1. Aging visibility. Sort receivables by how overdue they are, and chase the oldest and largest first. You collect more by working the list than by working your memory.
2. A gentle, standard message. A short, polite reminder on WhatsApp — the channel your customer already reads — is far easier to send than a call, and far easier to send consistently. Consistency is what actually brings money in.

Credit control isn't about being hard on your customers. It's about being clear — so the trust that makes the trade work doesn't quietly cost you the profit that makes it worth doing.