Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Orchard Close ·
The Coffin Not Counted
The undertakers' supply ledger shows one coffin more than the year's orders account for, and at the stocktake the yard cannot produce it.
- filed: "after the annual supply"
- reference: "OC/SU/04"
1. This report follows the annual supply audit at the premises of Messrs. Brack and Unwin, funeral contractors, Orchard Close, carried out under reference OC/SU/04. The audit compares three records held as one system: the supply ledger, in which stock is carried; the order book, in which clients' orders are written; and the yard count, in which the stockmaster walks the sheds and numbers what is present. The three records have reconciled every year since the firm's present constitution without exception, at a difference of nil.
2. The annual supply is placed with the joinery in the spring and delivered in one consignment. The ledger is written up at delivery: finch of timber, size, fittings, and the order-book line each stock is spoken for by. Where stock is delivered without an order against it, it is carried as spare, and the spare column has held between three and eight for the past eleven years.
3. This year the consignment was received complete. The ledger was written up in the usual form, and when the write-up had posted, the total of stock carried exceeded the total of stock ordered and the total of spare carried by one. A recast of the ledger found the same difference. The difference is one elm coffin, size six foot two, brass fittings, carriage paid, delivered, carried in the ledger at the end of the spare column, and marked against no order.
4. No line of the write-up is in an unusual hand. The entry for the elm is in the supply clerk's own fair hand, inked with the same pen as the facing entries, initialled where the initialling falls, and posted at the bottom of the page in the sequence of the delivery. The delivery note carried by the driver, which is retained, lists the same total as the ledger less one.
5. At the stocktake the yard count was taken twice, once by the stockmaster and once jointly with his under-count, Petch. The count in the sheds came to one less than the ledger total in both fellings of the tally. On the second walk the stockmaster followed the ledger down the spare column, shed by shed, and arrived at the position recorded for the elm, which is the end bay of the long shed, and the bay stood empty. The bay floor is clean, swept, and carries no marks of recent standing or removal that the stockmaster, examined on the point, could distinguish from its ordinary condition kept by him weekly.
6. Orders written since the stocktake have been met in ordinary course. The difference has not prevented a funerary service, and no client file has at any point shown a want. The firm's business has proceeded; the ledger, however, still carries the elm, and the carry-forward line now being written up for next year has been drafted to carry it also, the clerk stating to the audit that no entry could be found to strike, there being no order any longer spoken against and no yard absence to write in place of it.
7. Two particulars are drawn to the auditor's attention. The first is that the drift between ledger and yard has not moved since the stocktake, now six weeks, and appears to be held. The second is that the supply clerk, required to check the delivery note against the consignment a second time, did so in the audit's presence, and while doing so counted, unprompted, the number of pieces in the delivery as he remembered it arriving, and gave that number, and it was the ledger number.
8. The question the audit is asked by the firm to dispose of is the ordinary one, stock variance, and the answer the audit returns is that the procedure of the count found no variance of procedure. The stock is carried in the ledger. It is not in the yard. The order book does not claim it, and the client files of the firm, all fourteen for the year, do not account for its issue.
9. The audit recommends no write-down, no amendment, and no further stocktake before the spring, on the ground that a second count of the yard will produce either the same difference or a different one, and the firm is owed a year in which to observe which. Filing of this report is after the annual supply, as required, and before the spring, when the consignment will arrive and the ledger will be written up in the usual form.