General Clerks
Perform a range of clerical and administrative tasks.
A busy afternoon in the freight office
You are a general clerk at a freight company, handling mail, filing, data entry and anything the drivers and managers need from the office. It is 1pm. A stack of delivery dockets has been left on your desk, the phone is ringing and your supervisor has asked for a report by four.
Choose what you would do. Then see what happens. There are often good reasons for each choice.
I need a copy of the signed docket for yesterday's Northfield drop. The customer is saying they never got the goods and I am at the depot right now. Can you find it fast?
Tell Barry you will look for it as soon as you finish the report
The report is on time, but Barry waits an hour and the customer has already escalated. Some jobs cannot wait.
Look in the scanned folder, then the paper pile, and tell Barry
You find it in the scanned folder in under two minutes. Barry has proof and the customer backs down. Knowing where to look first saves time.
Tell Barry the docket was delivered, so it must be fine
You are guessing. Without the docket, there is nothing to show the customer. A record only helps if you can produce it.
Enter these thirty invoices into the system by three. They are a bit messy, and some have handwriting I can't read, but just get them done. Speed matters today.
Enter what you can, flag what you cannot read, and tell Gail when it will be done
Twenty-six go in by three and four are flagged. Gail checks them with the driver. Accurate and honest beats fast and wrong.
Enter them in the order given, and guess any unreadable details
Several are entered wrongly and a customer is charged the wrong amount. A guess in a data field is a mistake waiting to happen.
Enter the clear ones first, mark the unreadable ones and ask Gail or the driver about them
Most are done by three and the unclear ones are sorted the next morning. It is careful and takes a little longer than Gail wanted.
Can you use your login to enter this booking for me? Mine is not working and I have to get it in. It will only take you a minute and the customer is waiting.
Enter it under your own login and tell Dev to get his fixed
It goes in under your name, and you tell Dev to ring IT. Your name is on what you enter, so you know what you did.
Give Dev your password so he can enter it himself this once
Now he can do anything under your name. If something goes wrong, the system cannot tell who did it. Passwords are not shared.
Tell Dev to wait until his login works again, since you cannot help
The customer waits two hours, and Dev feels you could have helped. There was a safe way to enter the booking for him.
How it went
At four the report is done and the dockets are filed where they belong. General clerks keep a business running by being accurate, flexible and willing to find the answer. Would you like being the person everyone asks first?
This is a simplified, fictional situation to help you explore. It is not professional instruction or a test of your ability.
Case study: The docket in the wrong folder
A fictional case set in the office of a regional freight company that moves goods by road across three states.
The situation
Elena worked as a general clerk at Hartley Road Freight. A customer rang to say a delivery had been signed for two days earlier but the company's records showed it as still in transit. The customer was holding a payment until it was cleared. Elena's manager asked her to find out what had happened. There were four filing drawers, three scanning folders and a pile of dockets on a desk.
What they did
She started with the most likely place: the driver's run sheet for that day. It listed the delivery and the signature. She then searched the scanned folder under the customer's name, and then under the delivery address. The docket had been filed under a similar customer's name. She scanned it into the correct file, updated the system and rang the customer with the details.
How it turned out
The customer released the payment that afternoon. Elena's manager asked her to write a short note on how she had found it, and the company added a check at the end of each day to match dockets to the system. Elena said the satisfaction was in making a mess make sense.
What would you do?
- What was Elena's thinking when she picked where to look first?
- How could a team stop dockets going into the wrong folder?
- Do you think you would enjoy tracking something down like this?