by Serguey Shinder
When we started letting trade customers collect from our branches at the end of 2024, we needed a way for counter staff to know that the person at the desk was allowed to take goods on a customer's account. The answer we settled on, without much discussion, was the account number and the company name. If you could give both, the order went through and you signed for it.
In April 2025 a roofing firm in the Midlands queried its statement. There were nine collections on it from three of our branches over a fortnight, mostly copper cylinders and cable, a little over fourteen thousand pounds in all. Nobody at the firm had made any of them. Each one had been signed for by a polite man in hi vis who gave the right account number and the right name and paid nothing, because account customers do not pay at the counter.
When we worked out where he could have found the number, the honest answer was almost anywhere. It was printed on every invoice, every delivery note and every statement we had ever sent that firm. Delivery notes travel with the goods. They sit on dashboards, get pinned up in site cabins, are handed to subcontractors and thrown into skips. We had chosen as our proof of identity a number we printed on paper and gave to strangers several times a week.
An account number is a perfectly good way to find an account. It was never designed to say anything about the person asking for it, and we had quietly promoted it from a label to a key.
We changed four things. Each account now names the people allowed to collect, and the customer maintains that list themselves through their online account. Anyone not on it needs a collection code, which is sent to the account's registered contact when an order is placed for collection and has to be read out at the desk. If somebody arrives without one, branch staff ring the customer on the number we hold, never a number the visitor offers. And an account that collects for the first time from a branch it has never used, or buys well outside its usual pattern, raises a note to the credit team the same day.
There was some grumbling at first from customers who liked to send whoever was free. Most of it stopped when we explained what had happened to the roofers, whose losses we covered in full.
A number you print on paper and hand out every day can tell you which account somebody means. It cannot vouch for the person saying it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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