Cash Closing: Balancing the Till (Optional)

The first time a cashier opens the POS after the feature is enabled, the till asks for the opening float: the cash already in the drawer.

The till will not take a sale until this is done. A sale rung before anyone opens a shift still records normally, but it belongs to no drawer, and the point of the feature is that every hour of takings has an owner.

From then on, a Close Shift button sits in the POS toolbar.

Everything works as usual. Behind the scenes, every cash sale, refund and cash voucher taken at that till is tagged to the shift.

Two things you can record deliberately:

Both reduce or increase what the drawer is expected to hold, so neither shows up as a mysterious difference at the end of the night.

Only now does the app show you what it expected, and how it got there: the opening float, cash sales, any refunds, cash in and out on vouchers, float added, and each drop to the safe on its own line with its time and reason. Under that sits your count and the difference between the two. This is deliberate: if the expected figure appeared first, counting would quietly turn into typing, and the check would stop being a check.

The last line is Cash handled this shift: what was expected in the drawer plus everything dropped to the safe, which is all the cash the shift took in. It is not the figure you are counted against, and it exists so that a bank run mid-shift cannot look like money gone missing. Cash you refunded or paid out on a voucher is not added back into it, because that money left the business, while a drop only moved to the safe.

If the drawer is out by more than the tolerance you have set, you must explain the difference before the shift will close. The count itself is already recorded at that point, so the note explains it rather than changes it. The same box covers a channel that is out or one you could not get a figure for, so you explain everything once.

If your store has turned on Supervisor approval over tolerance, a manager enters the supervisor password after you have written your explanation. They are approving a difference that already has an account attached to it, which is the right order.

Once closed, the shift report opens. Print it on the receipt printer, print it on A4, or download it as a PDF, whichever your till has.

It shows the same working as the closing screen: the float, the cash taken, any refunds and voucher cash, float added, drops, what was expected, what was counted, the difference, and Cash handled this shift at the end. Every drop is listed again in full under Cash movements, with the time, the reason and who recorded it.

A shift closed before this working was recorded shows the shorter list it always did: the float, float added, drops and the expected figure. Its totals are unchanged; the app will not reconstruct the working for a count that has already been signed off.

Card and transfer are reported underneath, each with what the system recorded, what you declared and the difference between them, followed by a Total difference line adding the cash and channel figures together.

Those channel differences are never part of your cash difference, and that is deliberate. A card total that does not match is almost always the bank rather than the till: a batch that closed after midnight, a tip adjusted, a refund settling tomorrow. Only the cash difference is one a cashier answers for. The total line is there so nothing goes unaccounted for, not to say who owes what.

If a different cashier takes over, close the shift and open a new one. A drawer with two owners cannot be reconciled by either of them.

If the cashier has already gone home and a manager has to close their till, that is allowed but needs a supervisor, and the report records who closed it as well as whose shift it was.

A closed shift is never edited. If last night’s missing 20 appears the next morning, a manager posts an adjustment against the shift from Reports > Cash Closing.

The report then reads: short by 20, adjusted by 20, approved by whoever authorised it. Both halves stay visible, which is what makes the correction defensible if anyone asks later. A count quietly rewritten until it balances is not.

The same applies to a card or transfer difference. When the card machine settles short and the bank puts it right a day later, the adjustment box asks what is being corrected: the cash drawer, or one of the channels that shift took money on. It opens on the cash drawer, and the choice only appears when the shift actually had a channel.

A channel correction never touches the cash figures. Expected cash, counted cash and the cash variance stay exactly as they were, because a settlement question belongs to the acquirer and not to the person who counted the drawer. You also cannot correct a channel the shift never took money on, which stops a card difference being recorded against a till that only ever saw cash.

The shift report keeps the two apart on the page as well. Cash drops, floats and drawer corrections stay under Cash movements; anything settled against a card or transfer channel is listed separately under Channel settlements. Every line in the result box names its subject, so you always know whether a figure is about cash or a channel, and the channel states its position whether or not anything has been corrected.

The totals at the foot of the report are labelled at close. Those are the figures that were counted and signed off, and they never change; the box above shows where things stand today. Seeing two different channel figures there is correct, not a fault.

The channel figure on a shift is a total across every card and transfer channel, and a total cannot tell you that one channel is over while another is short by the same amount. It reports zero, and the shift looks settled.

On the Cash Closing report, click a shift’s channel figure to unfold every channel with its own recorded amount, what was declared, the difference, anything settled since, and where it ended up. When the channels point in different directions the figure is marked channels differ, so a net of zero is never mistaken for nothing to look at. The shift report carries the same per-channel detail.

A channel the cashier could not reconcile reads not reconciled rather than showing a difference of zero. Those are different statements, and the report never turns the first into the second.

Reports > Cash Closing lists every shift with its cashier, till, expected, counted, the cash variance, the net after any adjustments, and the channel variance.

Cash variance and net sit side by side on purpose. The cash variance is what was counted and signed off and never changes. The net is where that shift ended up once approved corrections are counted, so a shift that was short and has since been reconciled shows a difference in one column and zero in the other, and stops being counted as short.

The channel column works the same way: it shows where the channel ended up, with any settlement posted since printed underneath it. A card difference that the bank has since paid stops being flagged, exactly as a reconciled drawer does.

What to look at is the pattern, not one night. A single 5.00 shortfall is noise. The same cashier short every Tuesday is not.

An Unassigned cash line appears when cash was taken with no shift open. That is usually a back-office settlement or a till that started selling before anyone opened a shift. It is shown rather than hidden, because the money is real either way.

Settings > Master Data > Cash Closing controls: