Fable
In the southern goods warehouse, the shopkeeper and the chief manager were calculating the same account
The South Warehouse used to help people manage storage and charge a monthly custody fee. Later the shopkeeper bought a sorting machine that could automatically sort and print tickets, and customers gradually replaced manual work with machine work. At the end of the month, the clerk still counted heads to calculate the fee, but the customer said: I use your machine, not your people, so why charge by headcount?
The shopkeeper and the chief shopkeeper sat down to reconcile accounts and discovered that since the beginning of the year, the warehouse had collected two completely different kinds of money: one was a storage fee charged monthly per workstation, and the other was a performance fee charged by goods quantity and sorting accuracy. The two types of revenue were mixed in one ledger, and no one could say clearly which was making money and which was losing money.
The chief steward sent an assistant to the software shop on the next street to learn. He came back and reported that next door they sell software seats by the year, charging by how many accounts are opened, and this is called software as a service. What our warehouse sells is not seats, but the promise that after a batch of goods is sorted, fewer mistakes will be made, and they could not even say what that is called.
The shopkeeper pondered for three nights and suddenly understood: the shop across the street sells tools—whether a tool is good or not, you rent it and use it; our warehouse sells results—you give me a batch of goods, and I return you a correct list. Charging by seat for tools is perfectly natural, but charging by piece for results is what actually matches the cost.
So the warehouse split the accounts into two books. One was the tallying tool itself—if the customer only wanted that machine for their own use, charge monthly per tool. The other was the tallying service result—if the customer just wanted to throw goods in and take a list away, charge per batch based on accuracy and timeliness. Once the two books were separated, customers stopped arguing about why the rent was higher than next door for the same period, and began to willingly pay extra for accuracy.
Later a customer asked whether they could both rent tools and buy service results. The shopkeeper listed two lines in the contract: one for the tool subscription fee and one for the unit price of service results. The customer chose to rent tools for the full year plus pay for result services by batch. The shopkeeper felt pleased when doing the accounts—total revenue did not immediately rise, but every dollar could finally correspond to specific costs and specific commitments.
At the year-end accounts, the chief steward said something the apprentice still remembers today: sellers of tools and sellers of results can sound alike, but their purchase orders look nothing alike. This account is settled.