I’m mostly asking about the pre-modern era, but I suppose some of the questions still apply to the modern .01 Percent.
Imagine it’s 1826 and Lord Whatever (LW) has a beautiful manor home and a roster of servants. How would his chef have paid for the food that was brought into the home? I would imagine LW would have maintained accounts with the butcher, the baker, the grocer, etc., and the chef just bought what he needed on credit and then once a month the merchant would come to collect, and he’d be paid by LW’s … accountant? Or did LW put a few shillings into a safe from time to time and the chef would use that to pay cash for the goods?
What about cleaning supplies? Same thing? Tools the groundskeeper needed? All done on credit, paid for routinely by a different servant?
In the modern era, I imagine that the household staff who serve the ultra wealthy have “company,” as it were, credit cards to handle these things. Or am I wrong about all of it?
In the modern era it’s often handled by a Family office - Wikipedia.
Farther down the food chain, some sort of company credit card is the usual. The semi-fatcat has a CPA firm that handles all the bill-paying, a law firm that handles all the law stuff, and a concierge / property management company to handle their routine gofer stuff and keep all their houses spiffy, maintained, and secured.
The richest family I know is a guy who invented something you have all used, while he was in grad school and sold it for $100M+ when that was really big money (about twenty years ago). His wife is a non-working IP lawyer who has spent the last few years suing the local school district and town for one thing after another. Mostly NIMBY stuff, but also to stop sex education, DEI and the clincher, to prevent them from naming an elementary school after a former superintendent. Their kids did not attend the public schools of course. They attended some of the most expensive private schools in the country (including one that was ranked as THE most expensive private high school in the US.
They have a “household manager” who they advertised for a few years ago. The list of job requirements was ridiculous and the pay was $50k a year! She seems to manage all the other people who keep the family comfortable. I do know that she has what is effectively a corporate credit card, with which she plays landscapers, snow plow drivers, all the utilities, etc. She arranges transport for the children to and from school, and to activities and events. Maintains a calendar for them and the wife. She has to decide what she decides on her own and what she needs to get approval from the family.
In the old big houses and manors the housekeeper kept the purse for below stairs.
I doubt she had any purveiw to outside employees.
Beware of “personal managers”. Vet them carefully!
I remember in “Upstairs, Downstairs”, it was a plot point that the cook would order 10 pounds of beef (say) for the house and then would keep a pound for herself. So skimming and kickbacks and other chicanery was definitely something to be concerned about.
Also if you were a Member of Parliament living in a large estate, your house’s expenses would be a way to garner political support among tradesmen. So a town might have a Whig butcher who is patronized by the Whig MP (and his supporters) and a Tory butcher who is patronized by the Tory MP (and his supporters).
Back in the Goode Olde Days many nobles in most of Europe were know for living beyond their means - keeping up with the ffolkes-Joneses and putting on a front in court was a necessity in post=medieval times; plus, just because they were nobility, did not mean they were any better at managing finances as people today, plus a lower level of numerical literacy… There were many stories of the tailor or merchant or whatever having a large debt with the local lord.
According to my reference book Richistan most people beyond a certain level of wealth employ one or more managers to take care of the mundane - suitably covered by NDA’s. There might be a house manager, a business manager, or someone who does the necessary things like ensure passports are up to date, book the charter business jet, make sure property taxes are paid, call the plumber and have the exterior re-painted, manage the pool and gardening service (unless they need/afford full-time) etc. Presumably the housekeeper (or also chef depending on how fancy the household) takes care of the groceries and mundane like laundry and sending out drycleaning, make sure the tux and gown are ready for the next gala… I would assume in this day and age they would have a “corporate” credit card if the merchant were not regular enough to have a running tab. Oh, and don’t forget nannies.
When my mother was senile and feeble, we hired an aide, and we gave the aide a credit card with a limited line of credit. She did all the routine household shopping (groceries, cleaning supplies, etc.) from that account, and my sister glanced at the monthly bills to make sure they looked reasonable.
My mother was well off, but she had a few million of savings, not billions.
I remember in my youth tagging along with my stepsister and her husband doing household shopping, and it seemed to me - never having had to handle household finances - that Saturdays back then all they did is write cheques in the USA. So I would presume the house manager for a rich person, until credit cards became common in the last few decades, would be the one with signing authority on a house account. He would be responsible for writing the cheques for the butcher, baker, etc. and writing paycheques for the rest of the household staff. My educated guess would be there’s an arrangement with whatever finances the rich people had, to dump a fixed sum into the acccount each month, bookkeeping being part of the management duties, etc. Whether they trusted the cook to go into town for groceries with a blank cheque, or too much and “bring back the change”, or if the store let them run up a tab… I guess anything was possible.
The Atlantic has an article on this. Sorry it’s paywalled. Depending on your cookies you may only be able to read the first two paragraphs.
Managing the household, both staff and the household budget was the ultimate responsibility of Lady W. If you’ve ever watched Downton Abbey you’ll get a good sense of the administrative hierarchy among the servants, and only the Butler and Cook are likely to have had the ability to place an order to their suppliers, and they’d be accountable for those decisions when the invoices or bills came in at regular intervals. Other stores by the butler as household manager or an estate manager. The vast flotilla of servants were not given money to run down to the shops; this was not anarchy or utopia.
Apart from food and drink, which would probably be mainly standing arrangements with a range of generalist local to more distant specialist suppliers, things like cleaning supplies are likely to have been managed by a series of bulk purchases of basic chemicals, and decanted for use at Stately Wayne Manor. Just because we have aisles of specialist cleaning products, does not mean that people were always so stupid or incapable of using a more limited palette of household chemicals.
In the colonies, wealthier rural and remote landowners had a city agent whose main job was to receive their annual supply of fleece, beef hides, barrels of tallow or bags of grain and get them onto a ship to the markets. Their secondary job was to be the city-based gopher who would source requested materials, like a new ceramic dinner service, wallpaper for five rooms, the latest pianoforte sheet music and an ear trumpet and send it down on the return journey. In Australia at least this was a single annual shopping assignment - produce up, misc goods held on credit against prices realised coming back down.