Beth Lazell

6.30 AM

The alarm rings. Bleary-eyed I untangle from the sheets to find my alarm and snooze it. I snooze it four more times. Mornings are not my thing! I hop up, shower, clean the kitchen and get ready for the day. By 7.30 am I am out the door and on my way to work. I pop into the local bakery to grab a salad or baguette for lunch, and maybe a sneaky almond croissant if they haven’t already sold out. 

7.50 AM

By this time, I am walking through the front doors and starting up my computer. Most days of the week I start at 8.00 am, except some Tuesdays when we have a sales meeting at 7.30 am. In the mornings we open the shop, make sure the banking is done from yesterday, and start answering phone calls and emails. 

8.00 AM

The morning is our busiest time of day for customers to call, email or pop into the shop to place orders and pick up what they need for the day. I get phone calls for orders that I then do the paperwork for and give to our storeman to organize delivery. We have two storemen and three truck drivers that are always busy with deliveries and pickups. 

9.00 AM

I look after the ordering and stocking of packing cartons that our horticulture growers sell their fruit in. Some of these I order online to be delivered from Brisbane, and others I organize to be picked up from the suppliers in town. In the mornings I put through any orders for that day and ring the suppliers to let them know what we need. Once the daily orders are in, I then go through the stock we keep in our sheds and re-order anything that is getting low. I also talk to our big growers to forecast what they will need for the coming season. 

11:00 AM 

By late morning most of the trucks delivering stock to us have been and gone. The storeman unloads, ticks off what was received, and passes the paperwork on to me. I match up the delivery paperwork with the invoices that have been emailed or sent through our SAP system, add freight costs, and find any lost or wrong stock. I also make sure the stock is booked into the correct warehouse in the system, as we have a couple of locations it’s important to make sure the computer knows exactly where everything is. 

1.00 PM

Lunch is usually dependent on what everyone else is doing for lunch. If someone is going into town, I will have a bite to eat while I answer any phone calls or finish any paperwork the truck drivers need for their deliveries. If no one else wants to take on the town at lunchtime rush hour, I’ll make the 5-minute trip into town to drop off any soil and leaf tests or return items into the post office, check our PO box, and make the dreaded trip to the bank. Trekking down the main street and waiting in line at the bank with all the other people on lunch break is not my favorite job, but we all take it in turns, so I don’t mind too much. 

2.00 PM

Back at the office, I finish up any ordering or jobs from the morning and then have a look at our Chep dockets. Chep charges us every day for every single one of their pallets that we are keeping or delivering stock on. At any one time, we can have up to 3,000 Chep pallets on our account that we have to keep track of. I look after making sure all the pallets that come to us are accounted for and make sure we don’t lose any when they are delivered back to suppliers. My coworker oversees keeping track of them when they go out to and come back from our growers.

2.30 PM

I also look after making sure the branch's bills and invoices are all paid correctly and on time. I code all our freight bills to be paid out of our freight bank account and make sure all the other bills like electricity, forklift fuel, and gardener visits all come out of the correct accounts. If the head office accounts team receives a stock invoice that they cannot match correctly to a purchase order, they also send it through to me so I can fix up any issues. Some of the issues could be a big price difference, they charged us for more than we received, or we haven’t received anything yet.  

4.00 PM

At this time of the afternoon, I can tidy up anything that I haven’t gotten to yet. Sometimes I may have livestock invoices to process from our customers buying cattle at sale yards. I may have a SLOB/Deadstock report to go through, or a weekly stocktake to finalise. There may be some electronic payments to find in the national bank account or unallocated payments on people’s accounts that need to be cleared. Every day is different and there’s always something different to do. 

5.00 PM

Time to go home! We shut up the shop, do the end-of-day banking, and head home. I pop into Woolies or IGA on my way home if I need to, then head home, cook dinner, and do any housework that needs to be done. Afterward, I’ll chill out with a Netflix true crime documentary or hop online to see if any of my friends want to play a game. I’m in bed by 10.30 pm ready for the next day.  I love my job, there is always a customer to chat with, something new to learn, and something different to do every day. 

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