My father's spreadsheet

My father used to keep the company's numbers in a blue Oxford notebook. Later, when he fully retired, in an Excel. He made the spreadsheet himself, with columns coloured according to his mood. Income in green, expenses in red, unpaid invoices in bright yellow. It had eleven tabs. One per year. The last one, 2024, was left half-finished.

I called him from the car, driving back from Valencia.

—Dad, the accountant says the cash doesn't add up.
—Then look at the spreadsheet.
—I already have.
—Then look again.

He hung up. That was his way. He was never rude; he just belonged to the sort of people who believed that, if you pushed a little harder, things eventually explained themselves. That wasn't my way. I wasn't one to push. I had gone to Madrid to study computing, come back to the village when my mother got ill, and stayed because he was getting old and someone had to run the company, even though I didn't understand the business. Mari Carmen understood the business. She had been running the office since ninety-three.

—Love, your father charged some customers through the bank and others not.
—What do you mean, not?
—Some in cash. And some half and half.
—And where is that written down?
—In his head.

Mari Carmen said it without reproach, almost tenderly, the way you remember an old habit. Then she brought me a coffee in a plastic cup and went out to the yard for a smoke.

The blue diary

That afternoon I sat down with the spreadsheet. It was a Friday. Outside it was getting dark and the warehouse smelt of damp cardboard and forklift oil. I opened the tabs one by one. I remembered my father sitting in that same chair, his glasses on the tip of his nose, writing numbers while whistling Cielito Lindo. He did that when the numbers added up. When they didn't, he kept quiet.

I tried to reconcile one column. It didn't reconcile. I tried another. That one didn't either. After a while I stopped trying.

My daughter, who's sixteen, came in to bring me a sandwich.

—Lot of trouble?
—Quite a bit.
—Was grandad that bad at running it?
—He didn't run it badly. He ran it his own way.

She sat next to me and looked at the screen.

—Dad, this isn't software. This is a diary.

I looked at her. She was right. My father had never managed the company: he had recorded it. Each cell was a morning of his, an argument with a supplier, an invoice held up to the window light. The spreadsheet wasn't there to manage anything. It was there to remember.

A good starting point

On Monday I called a guy from Valencia. He builds dashboards for small companies, the kind that still keep delivery notes in a shoebox. I told him what I had and sent him the spreadsheet. He took two days.

—It's a good starting point —he said.

No one had ever said that to my father. I think if he had heard it, he would have whistled.

We started with the basics. Connecting invoicing, the bank and the warehouse, and seeing it all on one screen. No tabs, no mood-coloured columns. The first week, the guy sent me the link. I opened it on my phone, in the kitchen, while the water was boiling for pasta. I saw four big numbers: what had come in that month, what was still to be collected, real margin, and customers with overdue payments.

I looked at the last one. It was the mayor's cousin. He owed seventy-two thousand euros. Forty-one days late.

I called Mari Carmen.

—Did you know about the seventy-two thousand?
—I knew he owed. I didn't know how much.

The usual chair

The next day my father came to the office. He hardly ever came anymore. He sat where he always sat and I put the dashboard in front of him. He stared at the screen for a long while. He moved the chair. He took off his glasses. He put them back on.

—It does this on its own?
—On its own.
—The overdue payments too?
—Those too.
—Before, I used to know that at night. Not sleeping.

He said nothing more. But on the way out, at the door, he paused for a second and, without looking at me, without raising his voice, said what he hadn't said in forty years of running that company.

—It's alright, love. It's alright.

What the dashboard started telling us

The following month we discovered, almost by accident, that a product we had been selling since the year two thousand gave us less margin than its packaging cost. We dropped it. Nobody complained.

We also found out we had a small customer — one of those my father used to dismiss because he ordered little — who paid within seven days and gave us more margin than the three big accounts put together. I raised his service fee myself. He thanked me for it.

Mari Carmen started opening the dashboard every morning, before coffee. One day, closing the till, she said without looking at me:

—You know what, this is handy.

She said nothing more. Neither did I. But the next day she brought me, written on a napkin, a list of five customers who hadn't ordered in two months and who, with her thirty years of gut feel, she suspected were leaving. We called them. Two had left, yes. Three hadn't. Those three we would never have caught in time with the blue spreadsheet.

That night, as I closed up, I shut down the blue spreadsheet and filed it away in a folder on the desktop. I gave it the name I hadn't wanted to give it before.

Dad.

And I closed the laptop slowly, without a sound, the way you close the door of a room where someone, at last, has fallen asleep.