Receipts, job cards and prescriptions: print formats to settle first

Screens can be learned in a week. Paper is read by people who never saw the software. Think of the devotee holding a receipt, the insurer reading a job card and the pharmacist squinting at a prescription.

A changed layout raises questions. A missing field can make a document unusable. Settle paper first and the rest of the rollout calms down, because most arguments on day one are about a printout.

List every document that leaves the building or sits in a file for an auditor, then collect one recent sample of each. Black out the personal details. Pin the samples to a board where everyone can see them.

A seva receipt carries many small fields. Expect a number from an unbroken series and the date. Then come the devotee’s name, star and family line where the temple records them, the seva name, its performance date, mode of payment and the cashier’s initials.

Check the series first. If your old book ran from 1 to 5000 and stopped at 3120, decide how the new one continues. Gaps and restarts invite questions from trustees, and a trustee’s question can take a week to close.

Then check language. Many receipts print in two scripts, and a name that fits a handwritten line may wrap or clip on a narrow thermal roll. Print twenty real names, including the longest one you can find.

An estimate and a job card look alike but serve different readers. The estimate goes to the owner, who needs parts, labour and a validity date. The job card goes to the mechanic, who needs the complaint, odometer reading, fuel level and a note of existing dents.

Put the registration number in large type on both. The mechanic on the floor finds a job by plate. Nobody searches by customer name.

Check the parts lines for clipping. A long brake pad description that is cut in half causes a quarrel at the pick-up desk, usually about which pad was fitted.

A prescription has a strict reading order. The doctor’s name and registration number sit at the head, then patient name, age, sex and date, then the drug lines, then advice and a signature at the foot.

Each drug line needs the name, strength, dose, frequency, duration and route. If your doctors write the dose as 1-0-1, the printed format must show that notation exactly. Do not let a template spell it out in words.

Ask two doctors and one pharmacist to read a printed sample aloud at normal speed. Where they stumble, the layout needs another pass.

For every document, print the new version beside the old one and tick the fields off one by one. Note what moved, what is new and what is missing. Keep the sheet with the signed sample.

Print on the real printers, whether that is the thermal roll, the dot-matrix machine or the A5 pad. A layout that looks right on screen can drift on paper. Margins move.

The owner, the accountant and the person who uses the document each sign the approved sample. The day before go-live, print one test document of each type and hand it to the counter staff to try.