Billing for your bakery and sweet shop in Tripura
A kilo of sandesh, a box of twelve and a cake for Saturday, each billed the way you sell it.
From the first tray at dawn to the cake that is collected on Saturday
Yesterday's tray and today's tray, named apart
Through the glass the old tray and the fresh tray look the same. Name them apart, 'laddu, yesterday' and 'laddu, today', each with its own count. The helper lifts the old one first, and the fresh tray stays full until the old one is done. In the festival weeks the counter is crowded and the trays are refilled through the day. A tray named for its day tells the helper which laddus to sell first without asking, and nothing old is left behind the glass when the shutter comes down.
At four the full tray tells the kitchen to stop
On a quiet day the morning's coconut laddus are still on the glass at four. You tell the kitchen not to start the evening tray, and the next morning's trays are made smaller. A quiet day is known by the full tray and not by a feeling.
The group's pithas and the shop's laddus: which kitchen the glass counter's customers choose
Give the group a page as a supplier, and count each basket when the cloth comes off. The group's pithas are items of their own, so at the month's end their sales show what customers took from the group that the shop's kitchen does not make. You tell the leader what to send more of.
What helps a sweet counter that also bakes bread, cakes and snacks
Daily reports
The festival evening read back tray by tray the next morning, so the next one is baked to what sold.
The whole shop in one place
The village group's baskets, the order for flour and the day's trays in one place, instead of in three notebooks.
Godown stock
The sweets in the cool back room counted apart from the sweets on the glass counter, so the counter is refilled from a count.
Why the glass counter is hardest to keep honest on a festival evening in Tripura
Two people at the glass counter and one pencil
One helper reaches into the glass and calls out the sweet, and the other writes it down. On a festival evening the calls overlap, a laddu is written twice and a sandesh is missed. At closing the trays and the money in the box do not agree, and no one can say where the difference began.
Today's tray and yesterday's tray look the same through the glass
Coconut laddus made this morning and laddus left from last night sit in neighbouring trays. You mean to sell the old ones cheaper, and you remember until somebody else fills the counter. After that nobody can say how many of the cheap ones went at the full price, or how many trays were made too many on a quiet day.
Sweets from the village group arrive by the basket with no note of how many
A women's group in a village sends laddus and pithas to the counter every second day, in a basket covered with a cloth. The boy who carries it says a number, the basket goes onto the shelf, and the number goes nowhere. When the group's leader asks at the end of the month how many baskets you took, the two of you have two different answers.
The farms and fields behind the people who queue at a Tripura sweet counter
The people who queue at a sweet counter earn from fields, gardens and trees. Here are two districts and what their sites say.
- South Tripura's economy rests on agriculture, animal resources and fisheries: paddy, pineapple, jackfruit and banana are grown, with tea gardens, rubber and bamboo plantations.
- In Dhalai district, 76% of workers depend on agriculture; the district site names poor marketing facilities as a reason for backwardness, though NH 44 connects it.
Questions Tripura sweet shops and bakeries ask
The village group's leader comes at the month's end for her money. What do I show her?
Open the group's page. Each delivery is noted on it when it arrives, and the sales of the group's pithas are on their own line. You pay by the pieces sold, and the page shows both.
How do I bake for the Lakshmi Puja evening? Can I read last year's?
Open last year's full-moon evening in the daily report, where each sweet has its own line with the pieces sold. Bake this year's lot from that, with a little more of the sweet that finished first.
The pithas come by the basket and are sold by the piece. Do I count the basket or the pieces?
The pieces. Enter the basket as the number of pithas in it, so each sale takes a piece off and the count always shows pieces.
Lakshmi Puja evenings and a bakery run from a jail: two Agartala sweet stories
In Tripura, Lakshmi Puja on the Ashvin full moon is the main day to worship the goddess, and Agartala shoppers buy sweets, paan, flowers, fruits and coconut for it. For a sweet shop that is a date to plan for, a full-moon evening when the counter is asked for more kinds of goods than on an ordinary day.
In 2019 a bakery at Agartala City Centre, run by the Tripura Rural Livelihood Mission and the Tripura Correctional Station, sold 20 items and three beverages made by inmates of the Bishalgarh jail. It shows that baked goods in Tripura have been made and sold in more than one kind of place.