Thought It Was in Stock, It Wasn't? The Treatment Table

2026-11-02

Your face is in the hole of the treatment table, and all you can see is a square of grey lino and your own phone, lying on the floor where the physio asked you to put it.

It lights up. Then it lights up again.

You can read the preview from here, upside down and slightly blurred: New order: Chilli Oil, 6 jars. Gift. Needed by Saturday.

The physio presses her thumb into the knot beside your shoulder blade. "Breathe out," she says. You do. But the breath is not really about the shoulder any more.

Because there are six jars, aren't there? You made a batch three weeks ago. You sold some at the Sunday market. You sent a few parcels. You gave two to your sister. You think there are six. Maybe five. It could be four.

The number that lives in your head

Let's call you Mara. You make small-batch chilli oil in a rented kitchen, and you sell it online and at one market a month. It is a real business. Somewhere along the way you stopped counting the jars on paper and started counting them in your head.

It works, mostly. You know your best seller by feel. You know the shelf in the spare room, the crate in the car, the box under the stairs.

What you don't know is the exact number. Not at 10:20 on a Thursday, face down, with a stranger's thumb in your back.

The cost of not knowing is small, until it isn't. It's the little drop in your stomach when an order lands. It's the way you answer "is this in stock?" with "I think so" and then spend the rest of the day half-checking. It's the email you've written before, the one that starts "I'm so sorry, I'm afraid..." and ends with a refund and a customer who was looking forward to something.

It's the feeling of being a person who sells things but can't say what she has.

What you do instead of relaxing

The session ends. You pay, you smile, you say "much better, thank you", and you walk out to the car with your coat half on.

You don't drive. You sit in the car park and open the order.

Six jars, ordered by a woman called Helen for her father's seventieth. She's written a note: He puts it on everything. Please make sure it arrives before Saturday, it's a surprise.

A surprise. Of course it is.

You drive home faster than you should. You go straight to the spare room and count. Four on the shelf. You check the crate in the car. Two more, but one is a different batch, a milder one, with a different label.

Four. Maybe five, if you're generous about the mild one.

You stand there with a jar in each hand, and what you feel is not really panic. It's something quieter and more tiring. It's the sense that this will happen again, because nothing about how you work has changed. You just got lucky for a while.

The email you'd rather not write

You write to Helen. You tell her the truth: you can send four jars now, or six in a week, and you're sorry. You rewrite the first line three times.

She replies kindly, which somehow makes it worse. She takes four, and says she'll find something else to go with them.

You refund the difference. You lose a little money, and a little of the afternoon, and a little of that calm you'd just paid a physio to loosen up.

None of it is a disaster. That's what makes it hard to fix. It's a thousand small leaks, never one flood.

The moment it stops being a mystery

That evening you do something small. You don't buy anything and you don't make a plan. You sit at the kitchen table with a pen and a sheet of paper, and you write down what is actually in the house. Each product, each number.

It takes eleven minutes. When you finish, you look at the page and feel something you haven't felt in a while.

You can see it.

The oil you thought was nearly gone is fine. The one you thought was fine is nearly gone. There's a gap between what you believed and what was true, and you can finally see exactly how wide it is.

That's the turning point. It isn't a clever trick. It's the plain realisation that the worry was never about the jars. It was about not being able to see them. And seeing is something a simple system can do for you.

A Thursday that goes differently

Imagine the same Thursday, a few weeks on.

You're face down on the same table. The phone lights up on the floor. You read the preview, you register it, and you let your shoulders drop.

Because you know. Not roughly, not hopefully. You know how many jars are in the house, and you know that when the count dips below a certain point, you'll already have been reminded to make more, days ago, before anyone ordered anything.

The physio says "breathe out", and this time you do.

Later you answer Helen with one line: Yes, six jars, they'll go out tomorrow. No apology. No refund. Just a parcel and a surprise that arrives on time.

That's what the calm looks like. It isn't dramatic. It's the absence of that small drop in your stomach.

If that was you on the table

If you recognised yourself in Mara, there's a gentle next step. It's a simple Excel tracker for exactly this: your stock, your reorder points, and a dashboard that tells you what's running low before a customer does. It comes as a filled-in sample so you can see how it behaves, plus a blank template for your own products, and a short PDF guide. There's no subscription, and a 30-day money-back promise: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

Never Sold Out by Surprise – Inventory & Reorder Tracker (Excel)

It won't make your oil. But it might let you lie still on a Thursday morning and just breathe out.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.