A fact that had no owner
- Believed
- An order is paid once a single date stamp is set on the task.
- Actually
- Paying in stages never writes that stamp. When a payment has a schedule, the stages are the payment record — nothing is missing. So every screen asking for the stamp was blind to every rupee that had ever moved in instalments, which is how the largest orders are paid.
- It cost
- Finance was reminded every three days about money that had already left the account. At the gate, a load paid to the last rupee never reached the guard's list of deliveries to expect, so a fully paid lorry arrived at the barrier unannounced — the exact event that screen exists to prevent.
Nobody reported it. A reminder that is occasionally wrong teaches you to skim the whole class of reminder, and after that the one that matters costs the same as the ones that don't.
the whole note