- What it is
- A plain record of each order carrying its identifier, the amount, the date and the name of the other party.
- How you get one
- You transcribe the details from the order page while the order page still exists, once, and then leave the record alone.
- Where to keep it
- Off the market entirely, on storage you control, in a format you can still open in a year without special software.
- How it goes wrong
- It gets copied hurriedly and one character of the identifier is wrong, which makes the whole record worthless as reference.
- What fails without it
- Any question about what you ordered becomes your recollection against a system that has already cleared its own copy.
- Time to acquire
- A couple of minutes per order at the time, and no upkeep afterwards beyond keeping the file where you left it.
Markets tidy up after themselves
Order history on a market is a convenience for the market, not a service to you. It is trimmed for performance, cleared on schedules nobody publishes, wiped when an account is reset, and gone entirely if the account itself goes. None of that is unusual or sinister. It is just how the storage on a busy system gets managed.
The consequence is simple. The record you can rely on later is the one you took yourself. Everything else is a page you are hoping will still render.
Four fields and nothing else
Keep it thin. The identifier, because it is the only handle that means the same thing to both sides. The amount, in whatever unit was actually paid, because that is the figure a conversation will turn on. The date, because everything else is anchored to it. The counterparty, written the way they write it, because names are copied badly and a near-miss is not a match.
People are tempted to add a description of the goods, a status, a running commentary. The commentary is where records go to die. It grows, it stops being current, it contradicts itself, and eventually nobody trusts the file including you.
- Transcribe the identifier character by character, then read it back against the screen rather than eyeballing the shape of it.
- Write the amount in the unit that left your wallet, not in a converted figure that will drift.
- Use one date format across everything you keep, as set out on dates.
- Record the counterparty exactly as displayed, including capitalisation and any punctuation in the name.
A record you cannot argue with
The reason this thing exists is that recollection is soft and a written line taken on the day is not. If a question comes up months later about what was paid or when, an entry written before anybody was arguing carries a weight that a reconstruction does not. It is not that the file proves anything to a third party. It is that it stops you from being talked out of your own position by somebody who sounds confident.
It also protects you from yourself. Under pressure, people round amounts up, move dates towards whatever supports their case, and remember identifiers as being one character different from what they were. A file written on a calm evening is immune to all of that.
How a good record spoils
This item mostly keeps. What kills it is transcription error at the moment of writing, and a file that is edited afterwards. Once you start correcting old entries from memory, the record has become the same soft material you were trying to escape. If something in the file is wrong, add a dated line saying so rather than quietly overwriting the original.
Storage rot is the other one. A record locked inside a note-taking app you no longer run is not a record. Plain text survives everything, which is why where things live keeps coming back to it.
Sitting alongside the other order material
This record and the window note are written in the same pass and answer different questions. One says what the order was, the other says when it should have resolved. Together they are most of what the dispute material page describes, which is why that page mostly consists of pointing at things you were told to write down earlier.
Questions that come up
Is it safe to keep a file like this at all?
That is a judgement only you can make about your own situation, and this site is not going to make it for you. What can be said plainly is that the file contains what you already know, so it adds no information to the world that you were not already carrying in your head. The decision is about where a written copy sits and who can reach it, which is the subject of the reference page on where things live.
How long should I keep an entry?
Until the order is finished and any window in which anything could be raised about it has closed. After that the entry is history rather than working material, and history in a working file is a hazard, because you will read it by accident while looking for something live. Retiring an item covers how to drop things cleanly.
What if I only ever place one order?
Then the record is one line and takes under a minute. The value does not scale with volume. A single order that goes quiet is exactly the situation where you find yourself trying to remember an identifier you saw once, and one line written at the time removes that problem completely.