Monday night and the order form
Your wholesaler's van comes on Tuesday and Friday, and the order has to be in the evening before. So on Monday night, and again on Thursday, you stand in the cold room looking at what is left, then think about the week: the corporate contract on Wednesday, a funeral on Thursday, a birthday party order, the usual walk-in trade, and the website.
You write the order on the wholesaler's form or type it into their website. It is based on experience, and experience is good, but it is also tired at the end of a long day. Some weeks you are short of something you use every day. Some weeks you have too much of the flower you always buy.
When a member of staff covers the ordering during your holiday, it is harder still, because none of it is written down.
Why the order is built from memory
The information needed for a good order is in several places: sales in your till and website, pre-booked orders in a diary or order system, contracts in a spreadsheet, stock in the cold room. Nobody has time to add them together twice a week.
Your normal weekly sales are not recorded as stems. The till knows you sold forty bouquets, not how many stems of each variety went into them.
And wholesalers differ in what they offer and when. Some items come from one supplier, some from a market run, some direct from a grower. Keeping those straight is another thing to remember.
What ordering from memory costs
| Problem | Effect |
|---|---|
| Order depends on one person | Hard to delegate, even for a week |
| Bookings not added in | Short of stems for pre-booked work |
| Stock left in the cold room ignored | Buying what you already have |
| No link to weekly sales | Bestsellers running out midweek |
| Suppliers mixed up | Items missing because they were not on the right order |
The weekly order is where most of a florist's money is spent. A better order reduces waste and shortages at the same time.
Contract and subscription work make it more complicated. A hotel's weekly arrangements, a batch of subscription bouquets and a standing office order all need stems on specific days, and they are easy to forget when the order is written from memory. When they are left off, the shop buckets get raided to cover them, and the walk-in trade is short by the afternoon.
How we build the suggested order
- Your standard products each have a simple recipe of stems, set up with your florists, so sales can be turned into stems used.
- Pre-booked orders, weddings, funerals and contract work for the coming days are added from your order system with their own recipes.
- Your typical walk-in and website sales for that day of the week are estimated from recent weeks.
- Current stock is entered with a quick cold room count on a tablet, or estimated from the last delivery and sales.
- The system suggests an order per supplier, based on what each one usually supplies, grouped as their order form expects.
- You check, adjust and send, by email or through the wholesaler's website, and the actual order is saved to improve next week's suggestion.
The suggestion is a starting point. Your eye on the market and the season still decides what you buy, especially when prices and quality change.
Ordering that someone else can do
On Monday evening, the suggested order is waiting, built from the week's bookings, recent sales and what is in the cold room. You check it in minutes. When you are on holiday, your senior florist does the same.
- One suggested order combining sales, bookings and stock
- Orders grouped by supplier
- Ordering that can be handed to someone else
- Fewer shortages midweek and less over-buying
Does your weekly order look like this?
- The wholesale order is written from memory.
- Only one person can place the order.
- You sometimes run out of stems you use every day.
- Pre-booked work is not added up before ordering.
- You buy stems you already have in the cold room.