Jaideep's Supplier Card

Rate the wood and hardware shops you actually buy from on speed, quality and rate, then print a folded card that tells you who to ring for what.

Who this is for

Jaideep Malviya runs a four-man carpentry workshop off Sanwer Road in Indore, making wardrobes and kitchen shutters. He buys from about nine shops. The moment this lands is a Tuesday morning when a client wants sunmica in two days, Jaideep is on a site in Vijay Nagar, and his nephew Ashu calls from the market asking which laminate shop to walk into.

How the job is done today

It lives in Jaideep's head and in a red notebook where the last thirty pages are measurements, not shops. His phone has fourteen contacts saved as Bansal Ply, Bansal Ply New, Ply Wala Sanwer, and he cannot remember which Bansal sent warped sheets in Ramzan. There is a WhatsApp group with his two carpenters where orders get typed and then buried under photos of finished cupboards. When a delivery is late he shouts at whoever picked the shop, and then next month picks the same shop again, because nobody wrote down why they were angry.

The screens, in order

1. My shops — Shows every shop he buys from with its number, so adding one takes half a minute while he is standing at the counter.
2. A delivery came — Lets him mark what arrived from which shop and answer three quick questions about the day it came, the goods, and the rate.
3. Standings — Puts the shops in order for each thing he buys, so teak has its own list and hinges have their own list.
4. Shop page — Holds one shop's whole history, so he can see that the last two plywood loads from them both came a week late.
5. The card — Makes one page he can print at the copy shop next door and fold into a shirt pocket.

What it keeps track of

• Shops — shop name, owner's name, phone number, which market, what they sell
• Things I buy — teak, plywood, laminate, hinges and channels, screws and glue, whatever else he adds
• Deliveries — which shop, what came, which day it was asked for, which day it came, roughly what it cost, came on time or not, goods were good or not, rate was fair or not, a line of remark
• Cards printed — which day it was made, which shops were on it

The one decision that matters

One overall best shop, or a separate order for each thing he buys. One list is simpler and the card stays short. But the shop that sends teak the same evening is not the shop with honest laminate rates, and Jaideep already knows this in his bones. If the app hands back one champion, he will stop trusting it by the third week. Go with a separate order per material. The card then reads as four short blocks, teak, plywood, laminate, hardware, with the top two or three names and numbers under each. That is exactly what Ashu needs in the market, and it is still one folded page.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out rate history in rupees per sheet or per foot. Do not try to store what teak cost in March against what it costs now. Timber rates move weekly and Jaideep follows them better than any app will. Asking him one question after a delivery, was the rate fair that day, gets the same answer in one tap and never goes stale. Also leave out sharing cards with other carpenters. This is his card, about his shops, built from his own bad mornings.

How you would know it worked

Ashu goes to Sanwer Road with the folded card in his shirt pocket, buys laminate and two boxes of hinges from two different shops, and does not ring Jaideep once.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I am a carpenter in Indore and I buy from about nine shops for teak, plywood, laminate, hinges and screws. I want an app on my phone where I save each shop with its name, the owner's name, its number and what it sells, and every time a load comes in I open it and answer three quick things, did it come on the day it was promised, were the goods good, was the rate fair, with room for one line of remark. From that I want it to quietly keep a running order of which shops are best for each material separately, not one overall winner. Then I want a button that makes a single page I can get printed at the copy shop next door and fold into my shirt pocket, showing for each material the top two or three shops with their phone numbers, so my nephew can go to the market without ringing me.