Client stories

What changed on the table, including one hour that was too short.

These accounts name the engagement, the papers, and the constraint. They are not a score. If your year looks unlike theirs, say so when you write — the sitting starts from your envelopes, not from a favourite story.

Annual Income-and-Expense Plan

I used to count the morning fees and feel the month was safe, then school-fee week arrived and the drawer was suddenly thin. Malai made me put the school term on the same sheet as the gauze and the rent. The first quarter I still overspent on a family trip, and we had to lower the draw. I was glad she wrote that down instead of smoothing it over.
Siriporn, Clinic owner, Ra-ngae

New Practice Cash Map

My income sits in the six weeks before exams and then goes quiet. The three sittings stopped me treating March as if it would repeat in May. I still wish the sketch had room for a second classroom I was dreaming about, but that was my hurry, not a hole in the map. The floor for rent and food is the page I keep in the textbook cupboard.
Kittisak, English tutor, Su-ngai Kolok

Opening Ledger Review

We emptied a rice sack of receipts onto the table. Anan had grouped them by month before I arrived, which saved the hour. I learned that the household coconut and the restaurant coconut were not the same purchase, even when I bought them from the same auntie.
Wipa, Restaurant on the market road

Quarterly Sitting

The first sitting was too short for both the trading book and the family's rice account. We only finished the sheet sales, and I had to come back the next week for the household side, which I had not budgeted time for. The second hour was the useful one. Since then I bring a cash sheet that already splits the two, and ninety minutes is enough.
Nattapong, Rubber trader, Ra-ngae district

Two years, told a little longer

A clinic drawer and a school-fee week

An empty clinic reception desk after hours with a closed appointment book and a cash box

Siriporn has run a small dental clinic in Ra-ngae for nine years. Morning fees were counted in a tin. Supplies were paid in cash at the end of the week. The family's school fees, a parent's medicine, and the clinic's gauze all left the same tin, so a busy month and a frightening month could be the same month.

In the opening sitting we did not talk about growth. We listed what the tin had actually paid across the previous year, then placed the school-fee months on a strip of paper beside the months when patients travel and the chair is quiet. The annual plan that followed set a draw that survived the quiet month, and a set-aside that was untouched when a cousin asked for a loan. Siriporn still keeps the tin. It now has a second envelope taped to the lid.

At the second quarterly sitting she had spent the generous month on a trip. The note from that day lowered the next draw instead of scolding the trip. She says that sentence is the one she remembers.

Exam weeks and a quiet May

Kittisak began tutoring from a rented room near Su-ngai Kolok eighteen months ago. Parents paid in a rush before exams. May, after the results, was almost empty, and the room rent did not know that.

The new-practice cash map used only the months he had already taught. We refused to sketch a second classroom into the picture. The six-month page put May's rent next to March's fees and gave him a draw small enough to pay in a week with two students. He later asked for a quarterly sitting, and brought a notebook where each family is a line. The reservation he still mentions is fair: he wanted the dream classroom on the page, and we left it off until the rent had been paid through one quiet season.

Read the annual plan