The ledger before the monitor
· Gerald Pruitt
We started keeping a ledger in the second year. A line per customer: name, clubs, what we did, what it cost.
The ledger from 1989 has a column headed Notes. In it I wrote things like slices left, flat, too stiff. They are the same things I find on a monitor today, expressed as numbers.
What changed
Not much. The monitor tells us faster and with more confidence. It also lets the customer see it, which no handwritten note could.
We still write in the ledger. The monitor is for the hour. The ledger is for the decade.