Pricing you can work out on the back of a receipt.

One till. Forty regulars on credit.

You know every name in the book by heart. The problem is not the number of people, it is the handwriting — three different pens, two of them your cousin’s, and last February is water-stained. Basic gives every macmiil an account, a balance that adds itself up, and a receipt you can point at when someone remembers a payment differently. You still send the reminders yourself. At forty names, that is fine.

Two hundred accounts. You are texting people on Friday.

Somewhere past a hundred and fifty names, chasing became the job. You start at nine in the morning, you are still typing at noon, and the four people you feel most awkward about are the ones you quietly skip. Standard sends the xasuusin for you — Somali or English, each message carrying that person’s own balance — and by Saturday you are reading what came back instead of writing what is owed.

Three stores. You are driving between them.

You cannot stand behind the counter on Cedar Avenue and the one across town at the same time, so you find out about a bad week on Sunday night, from a notebook someone else filled in. Scale puts every location on one screen: balances per store, staff who see only what they should, alaab moved from the store with too much to the store with none. The driving stops being how you get the numbers.