- What it is
- A short dated line for each open order recording the window the listing stated and the day your count began.
- How you get one
- You write it as the order goes through, copying the stated window across rather than trusting yourself to recall it.
- Where to keep it
- Alongside your other order material, offline, in the notebook or plain file you already use for this sort of thing.
- How it goes wrong
- Lines stay behind after orders close, so an old window sits in the file looking exactly like a live one.
- What fails without it
- You lose the ability to tell a late order from an ordinary one, so you either wait far too long or complain far too early.
- Time to acquire
- A minute per order, spent at the one moment when the window is actually in front of you.
A window is a statement made once
The window is whatever the listing or the vendor said about time. It is stated at the point of ordering, it is rarely restated, and it is not attached to the order afterwards in any form you can rely on. People remember it as a vague feeling of roughly how long this normally takes, and that feeling drifts. It drifts towards impatience when you are waiting and towards generosity when you would rather not think about it.
A written line replaces the feeling with a fact you can look at. The value is not that the line is precise. The value is that it was written before you had any opinion about the outcome.
Writing it while the order is still in front of you
There is one moment when all of this is on screen together: the identifier, the amount, the stated window, the day. After that the pieces separate. The confirmation page goes. The listing text can be edited by the person who wrote it. Your own memory keeps the shape and loses the detail.
So the line gets written then, in the same pass as the rest of the order record, not later in the evening and not tomorrow. Copy the window across in the vendor's own words rather than paraphrasing it into something tidier. A paraphrase is where the drift starts.
| Field | What goes in it | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Order tag | Whatever short handle you use for that order | So the line joins up with the rest of your material |
| Day it went in | The date you placed it, in the format you use everywhere | Because the count starts somewhere and you will forget where |
| Window as stated | The vendor's wording, copied not summarised | Paraphrase is where the drift begins |
| Counting from | Payment, confirmation or dispatch, whichever the wording meant | The same window means different things from different start points |
Telling when the note has gone soft
The note ages in two directions. The obvious one is that windows pass. The less obvious one is that finished orders leave their lines sitting in the file, and a file of closed orders written in exactly the same format as open ones is worse than no file, because you will read the wrong line under pressure and reassure yourself with a date that belongs to something else.
The maintenance is small. When an order closes, the line comes out or gets struck through in a way you cannot misread at a glance. If the file has lines in it whose outcome you can no longer remember, it has stopped being a working note and become a diary, and it should be cleared.
What goes wrong without the line
Two failures, both common. The first is early noise: you raise something while the order is comfortably inside the window you were given, which costs you standing and tells the other side you are not tracking anything. The second is late silence: the window went by weeks ago, you never noticed, and by the time you look, the period during which anything could have been raised has gone too.
The dispute material page covers what you would need if it does come to that. The window note is the thing that tells you when to go and look at it. The general habit of putting a date on anything you write is set out on dates, and the same habit runs through the notebook at the other end of this inventory.
Questions that come up
What if the vendor never stated a window?
Then that is what the line says. Record the absence in the same place you would have recorded the window, with the date, and treat the order as having no agreed clock. This is more useful than inventing a reasonable-sounding period from experience, because a made-up window will later be remembered as something you were told rather than something you assumed.
Should the note live in the market account?
No. The account is the thing most likely to be unavailable at the moment the note matters, and account-side notes are cleared along with the order they attach to. Keeping the line offline costs you nothing and removes the whole class of problem where the record and the thing it describes disappear together.
How many orders should the file hold?
Only the open ones. The point of the file is that a glance at it tells you what is currently outstanding and how long it has been outstanding. Once you start keeping history in the same place, the glance stops working, and you end up reading a closed order's dates while worrying about a live one.