Standing Orders and Pricing Per Customer for Jar Businesses

Most of a jar business runs on promises that nobody writes down well. “Two jars every morning.” “One jar on alternate days.” “Send three extra for the function this week.” If these live in a driver’s memory or a line in a register, every route is built from guesses, and every bill is argued about later.

A standing order is the fix. It is a written, repeatable instruction: this customer, this many jars, on these days, at this price. This guide shows how to structure standing orders, how to price per customer without a mess, and how to keep changes under control.

What a standing order contains

Every standing order, on paper or in an app, needs the same six things.

• The customer and the delivery address.
• The number of jars per delivery.
• The pattern: every day, alternate days, or certain days of the week.
• The start date.
• The price per jar that applies to this order.
• An end date, if the order is temporary.

If any of these is missing, someone fills the gap by guessing. The price and the end date are the two most often forgotten.

The four common patterns

Regular daily

A shop, office or clinic that takes the same number of jars every working day. This is the easiest to run. The route builds itself, and the driver knows what to carry.

Alternate days

A household or small office that uses a jar every second day. The trap here is drift. If the pattern is only “alternate days” with no fixed start date, nobody can say whether Tuesday or Wednesday is the delivery day after a holiday. Fix the start date, and count from it.

Weekly

A customer who takes, say, six jars once a week on a fixed day. Weekly orders need a named weekday. “Weekly” alone leads to the customer calling on Thursday asking where the jars are.

Temporary

A wedding week, a construction crew for a month, an office with a visiting team. Temporary orders are where jar businesses lose money quietly. The order starts, nobody remembers to stop it, and jars keep going out for weeks after the customer needed them. Always set an end date when you create the order. If the customer wants to continue, extend it on purpose.

Regular order, extra on top, temporary

Think of a customer’s orders in layers.

1. The regular order is the base. Two jars daily, for example.
2. An extra on top adds to the base for a while. The same customer wants two more jars every day this week because guests are staying.
3. A temporary order stands alone and ends by itself on a date.

Keeping the extra separate from the regular order has a practical benefit. When the extra ends, the base order is still there, unchanged. You do not have to remember to edit the regular order back down, and you do not get a customer who is accidentally getting four jars a day for three months.

Pricing per customer

Many jar businesses charge one price to everyone, and then discover they cannot. Prices differ between customers for reasons that are real.

• Area. A customer on a long, difficult route costs more to serve than one next to the plant. Fuel, driver time and the number of stops per hour all change.
• Volume. A shop taking twenty jars a day and a household taking two are different relationships. Many owners give the larger customer a better rate.
• History. A long-standing customer was quoted a rate years ago. Moving them takes a conversation.
• Payment behaviour. Some owners price a customer who pays on delivery differently from one who pays at month-end.

This guide does not give you a price for any of these. Your cost, your area and your competition set your numbers. The jar margin calculator at /tools/jar-margin-calculator/ can help you work out what a jar costs you to deliver before you decide.

What matters is that each customer has one clear price attached to their order, and that you can find it in seconds. If the price is in your head, you will quote two different prices to the same customer within a year.

A default price and an exception price

Keep a catalogue price for the standard jar. Give every customer who pays something different an own price on their order. Orders with no price set fall back to the catalogue. This keeps exceptions visible. If thirty customers pay catalogue price and four do not, you know exactly who the four are.

Handling extras on top of the day

Customers ask for more on the day. “Bring one more today.” These are not standing orders and should not be entered as one. Record them as an extra on that day’s stop, at the price that applies.

Two habits help.

• Say the price when the customer asks. If the extra is at a different price from the usual one, flag it so the office sees it before billing.
• Do not let extras turn into the regular pattern by accident. If the same customer asks for one more jar five days running, that is a signal to change the standing order. Ask them, then update it with a start date.

Price-change discipline

Price changes cause more bill disputes than any other event. A few rules prevent most of them.

1. Change prices from a date, never mid-invoice. Pick the first day of a month or a billing cycle. Everything before that date uses the old price.
2. Tell the customer before the date. A call or message a week ahead costs nothing. A surprise on the invoice costs you a relationship.
3. Write down the old price, the new price and the effective date. When the customer says “it was always this rate,” you can show them.
4. Change one order at a time. If you are raising prices for a whole area, go through the customers individually. A bulk edit that overwrites a special rate is a fast way to upset your best customer.
5. Never edit a price on an order that has already been billed. Create the change going forward.

Ending temporary orders properly

When an end date arrives, the order should stop with no action from anyone. That is the point. On the last day, the driver does the final delivery, the office checks the empties are back, and the order drops off the route.

Before the end date, check three things.

• Has the customer returned all the empties you gave them for the period?
• Has the extra volume been billed at the right price?
• Does the customer want to continue? If yes, extend on purpose and note the new end date.

Example: three customers

This table is an Example with made-up round numbers. It is illustrative only. It is not a market price list and not an average.

Read it row by row. Shop A has an own price because of volume. Household B has no special price, so the catalogue price applies. Office C has two layers. After the 15th, the extra drops away by itself and the office is back to four jars daily, with nobody needing to remember.

Now imagine you raise the catalogue price from the 1st of next month. Household B changes automatically, since it follows the catalogue. Shop A and Office C do not change, because they carry their own price. You decide separately whether to move them. That is the benefit of separating the default from the exceptions.

How Pyaau helps

Pyaau builds each driver’s route every night from customers and their standing orders, so the pattern you wrote down is the route the driver gets. A standing order can be regular, extra on top, or temporary with an end date, set to daily, alternate days or weekly. Each order can carry its own price, and an order with no price uses the catalogue price. Extra orders and plant pickups can be recorded on the day, with a flag when the price was changed so the office can see it.

For the next steps in billing, read month-end billing without disputes and what to record on every jar delivery. If you run more than one route, see running multiple delivery routes.