Wage registers without the Friday paper chase

For three years our wage system was five registers and one tired Excel file. Each site kept its own register, the supervisor tallied his site on Friday evening, and the Excel file got updated at my kitchen table on Friday night, which is a polite way of saying Saturday morning. Twice a month the two disagreed, and twice a month I sat with a supervisor over milk tea, working out whether Hari dai worked the 12th or not.

The registers weren't the problem. The gap between the register and the ledger was.

The Friday ritual, itemized

Here is what the old week cost us, and I mean cost in hours, not rupees, though it was rupees too.

Friday, 4 pm: each supervisor adds up his own register. Kalimati says 34 names, Koteshwor says 21. One of them forgets the half-day for the rain morning and rounds up, because rounding in the worker's favour is the path of least argument.

Friday, 9 pm: I key five sets of numbers into Excel, with advances and baki subtracted from memory of last month's memory.

Saturday, 8 am: payouts, and the two or three arguments. The arguments were never malicious. They were arithmetic done twice by different tired people.

Nobody ever argued their way to a smaller wage bill. They argued from memory, and memory loses to a register.

What changed, precisely

The register didn't move to the computer. The register moved to the moment the work happens.

Attendance is marked at the gate now, on the supervisor's phone, before the men disperse. A half-day is a half-day at 11 am when it happens, not a rounding decision at 4 pm. An advance given against a name this morning is on that name by lunch, visible to the office, deducted on Saturday's list automatically. The site ledger and my ledger stopped being two documents somewhere in that change. They are one ledger that five sites write into as the week happens.

Saturday morning is now a printout, not an investigation. The payout list comes out of the system, the numbers on it were agreed on the days they were earned, and the tea is for drinking, not for arbitration.

The part I didn't expect

I expected to save the Friday evening. What I didn't expect was what the workers noticed.

A man can ask any day, mid-week, what his month looks like, and the answer on the screen matches what he kept in his head, because both came from the same morning. Before, a worker's own tally and our tally diverged silently for weeks, and the divergence surfaced on payout day as a scene. Now it surfaces on Tuesday as a question, and the register answers it in front of him.

The wage bill didn't shrink. It was never supposed to. What shrank was the space between a day's work and the record of it, and in that space is where every wage fight I have ever witnessed was born.