Billing for your dhaba and restaurant in Haryana
Parathas by the dozen, the bus party at noon and the butter that runs out, on your phone.
From the stuffing list to one bill for a whole bus
Every stuffing as an item, the butter and curd as extras
Keep aloo, gobi, paneer and mooli parathas as separate items with their rates, and extra butter, curd and lassi as items of their own. The table's order becomes one bill in seconds, with each line named, and the bill can go to the table on WhatsApp.
One bill for the bus, with every dish named, paid by one man
Make one bill under the name of the party's organiser, with each dish as a line. He sees what he pays for and can ask about a line before paying. The bill goes to his phone on WhatsApp, and the party eats while he settles.
The Sunday butter and curd counted before Sunday
Keep butter and curd as stock with a low-stock mark. Open the last few Sundays in the report and see when the butter ran out. Order for that hour, not for the whole day, and put the extra in before the first bus arrives.
What a Haryana highway dhaba uses
Bills on your phone
A table of two aloo, a gobi and a paneer paratha, extra butter, curd and a lassi, billed in one go and sent on WhatsApp.
GST bills
A GST bill for the bus company that pays for its drivers' and guests' meals, with the tax worked out on each dish.
Low stock warnings
A warning on Sunday noon that the white butter and the curd are nearly gone, before the late buses arrive.
Daily reports
Every Sunday kept on its own line, so the hour the butter ran out last month shows next to the hour the first bus came.
Parathas by the dozen and the bus that stops at noon
A paratha has a stuffing, a side and a lump of butter, and each is a line
One table asks for two aloo, one gobi and a paneer paratha, with extra butter on one, a bowl of curd and a glass of lassi. The order is shouted to the tandoor, and the bill is added in the head of the man at the counter. When the table has four hungry men and a child, the total is a guess, and the guess is usually low. The tandoor man cannot stop to add it up, and the boy at the counter is only a boy.
The bus that stops at noon with a whole wedding party
A coach pulls in and fifty people step down, hungry, and the owner wants one bill and one payment from one man. The tables fill in a minute. Orders come from many hands, nobody remembers who asked for what, and the man who pays wants to see what he is paying for before he opens his wallet.
White butter and curd that are gone by two on a Sunday
A paratha without butter is not a paratha, and a plate of curd is half the meal. On a weekend the butter and curd are finished by two in the afternoon, and the rush is still coming. You find out when the first customer after two is told there is none, and he drives on to the next dhaba.
Kundli's workers and Hisar's mills: who passes a Haryana dhaba
A dhaba feeds whoever is on the road. Two districts show who that can be.
- In Sonipat, The Tribune called the Kundli industrial estate a preferred industrial destination in January 2019.
- Hisar is called the City of Steel and has spinning mills and grain, fruit and herb processing, along with the largest galvanised iron manufacturing unit.
Stuffings, bus parties and butter: what Haryana dhabas ask
A truck driver wants to show his owner what he ate on which day. What does the bill carry?
The bill carries the day and each dish. The driver forwards every bill from the road, and his owner reads, day by day, where the truck stopped and what the driver ate there.
A paratha with two stuffings is half aloo and half paneer. Is that one item or two?
Give it an item of its own with its own rate. Keep the aloo and the paneer as stock, and each night take half a portion off each for every half-and-half paratha sold.
Which stuffing is finished first on a day when the buses stop one after another?
Each stuffing is its own item, so the day's list shows how many of each went. The one at the top of a bus day is the one to start more of the next time.
The table orders again after the first round, for the men and a child. Who gets the final bill?
Send it to the phone of the man who says he pays. The men's parathas, the child's lassi and the second round all sit as lines on that one bill, so when the table rises there is one total and one phone to ask.
Murthal on the GT Road: a dhaba that began with truck drivers
Truck drivers told Prakash Singh that Delhi's outskirts lacked a good rest stop and suggested Murthal on the GT Road, where he set up his dhaba in 1956. A dhaba that starts with drivers learns early that the customer is in a hurry and on a road.
Murthal's Amrik Sukhdev Dhaba, founded in 1956 mainly to feed truck drivers, said in 2015 that it serves 8,000-10,000 customers daily. At that number a bill that waits for a pen is a queue, and a small dhaba on the same road meets the same rush in a smaller room.