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HOW FLORISTS 



KEEP BOOKS 



No department of the average florist's huslness has received so little 

 attention, in proportion to his progress in other respects, as the hookkeep- 

 'ing. In its endeavor to promote better business methods, The Review pre- 

 sents here a description of one firm's accounting methods, for readers' study. 



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VEEY business, whether it 

 be a personal enterprise, 

 a partnership or a corpo- 

 ration, must have some 

 method of keeping ac- 

 counts; some means of ar- 

 riving at what the ex- 

 penses are and the amount 

 of gain or loss for a given 

 period. The latter cannot 

 be done intelligently until proper ac- 

 counts have been set up and all financial 

 transactions systematically recorded. 



Florists may well feel proud of the 

 wonderful progress made in floriculture 

 during the last few years. The many 

 new productions in all kinds of flowers 

 and plants may well be classed as won- 

 derful. The Society of Amer- 

 ican Florists, the Florists' Tele- 

 graph Delivery Association and 

 all the various other organiza- 

 tions, aided by the national pub- 

 licity campaign and backed by 

 real service on the part of the 

 individual florists, have placed 

 our business on a high plane, 

 but have our methods of keeping 

 accounts maintained pace with 

 these great developments? 



Many florists have made 

 marked improvements in their 

 accounting systems, but, I dare 

 say, there are yet many compara- 

 tively progressive florists who 

 cling to the old, haphazard meth- 

 ods of handling this important 

 part of their business and are 

 slow to apply more up-to-date 

 methods. 



A free discussion of this sub- 

 ject would no doubt be of much 

 interest and would prove bene- 

 ficial to the florist who thinks he 

 has a good system, aa well as 

 the fellow who has given but lit- 

 tle attention to his books. 



In placing before the readers 

 of The Review the system oper- 

 ated by Baum's Home of Flow- 

 ers, of Knoxville, Tenn., I do 

 not assert that it is the best sys- 

 tem in use or that it should "be 

 necessarily adopted by other flo- 

 rists. I merely present it for 

 what it is worth, and if anyone 

 has something better, we shall 

 be glad to hear from him. We 

 are always glad to change for 

 ^iomcthing better. 



Handling the Order. 



We use a special order blank 

 prepared for us by the American 

 Sales Book Co., of Elmira, N. Y., 

 which, when properly filled out. 



By ROBERT E. MAPES. 



supplies all the information necessary. 

 It is reproduced on this page. These are 

 put up in pads of fifty each, with dupli- 

 cate copies and a sheet of carbon to each 

 pad. If the order is paid for, both copies 

 are stamped "paid," and the dupli- 

 cate is given the customer as a receipt. 

 The original is sent to the office by 

 means of a cash conveyor, where the 

 card is written and attached. From 

 there it is sent to the workroom for exe- 

 cution. In the case of a charge order, 

 both copies are sent to the office, where 

 the duplicate is i)laced on file, and the 

 original is sent from there to the work- 

 room with card attached after being 



BAUM'S HOME OF FLOWERS. Inc 



KNOXVILLE, TENN. 



MEMBER FLORISTS' TELEGRAPH DELIVERY 

 INVOICE 



ALL KNOXVII.LE FLORISTS ARE CLOSED ON SUNDAYS BY AGREEMENT 



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Order Blank That Tells Whole Story. 



O.K.'d by the credit man. At the close 

 of the day the original orders that have 

 been filled are taken from the work- 

 room to the office, where the paid orders 

 are filed on a paid order file. The charge 

 orders are classified and arranged in al- 

 phabetical order and totaled on the add- 

 ing machine. The total is entered to the 

 credit of sales and charged to the Ac- 

 counts Receivable controlling account 

 through special columns in the cash jour- 

 nal. The charge tickets are then num- 

 bered and posted direct to the custom- 

 ers' ledgers, after which they are filed 

 in numerical order on a file designed to 

 hold a month 's business. The duplicates 

 of the charge orders are filed in an al- 

 phabetical file and at the end of the 

 month are sent to the customers 

 as statements. In the event the 

 customer's account shows a bal- 

 ance from the preceding month 

 or the customer has made iwo or 

 more purchases during the cur- 

 rent month, a regular statement 

 is made and the invoices are at- 

 tached. We find this method a 

 jrreat help in getting out our 

 statements at the end of the 

 month, and it also supplies the 

 customer with an itemized in- 

 voice showing who made the pur- 

 chases and where they were de- 

 livered. In the case of agents', 

 V. T. D. or wholesale orders, the 

 duplicates are mailed at once to 

 the customer and a regular state- 

 ment is made at the end of the 

 month showing only the dates 

 and amounts of items purchased. 



Customers ' Ledgers. 



We divide our customers' ledg- 

 ers into four groups, as follows: 

 Local or retail, agents, F. T. D., 

 wholesale accounts. We use or- 

 dinary loose-leaf ledgers of uni- 

 I'oriii size, which work jiractical- 

 ly the same as the card system, 

 except that we do not always 

 remove the sheets as soon as the 

 accounts are closed. At regular 

 intervals we remove closed ac- 

 founts that have not been active 

 Air some time and file in a trans- 

 fer file. We find it is .a waste of 

 time to transfer an account that 

 we liave reason to believe will 

 be active again soon. We only 

 put one account on fach page. 



Collections. 



We make a receipt in tripli- 

 cate for all money received on 

 account. The original is given 

 the customer, the triplicate is 



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