Cashing up in four minutes

Why cashing up takes so long

Not because counting notes is slow. It is slow because the card total and the till total disagree, and finding out why means going backwards through a day you have already stopped thinking about.

Most of the disagreement comes from three things.

Refunds taken on the wrong day

A refund processed on Tuesday for a Monday sale shows against Tuesday in the card report and against Monday in the till. Small, and enough to send you looking. Record the refund against the original sale and the two agree.

Payments that have not settled

If your provider batches at 11pm and you close at 5.30pm, the afternoon’s payments are sitting in a state that is neither pending nor settled, and the figure moves after you have written it down. Look at the authorised total, not the settled total, and check settlement the next morning instead.

Tips, surcharges and rounding

Any amount added after the sale price lands somewhere different in the two systems. Decide once where it goes and stop changing it.

The morning half of the routine

Open the drawer with a counted float and write it down. Nearly every unexplained discrepancy at 6pm is an uncounted float at 8am.

What four minutes looks like

Print the day’s figure. Count the drawer. Subtract the float. Compare. If they match, put it in the safe and go home. If they do not, the report will tell you which sale to look at, because it lists them by hour.

The part that is not arithmetic

The real saving is not the twenty minutes. It is not carrying an unexplained $11 around in your head until Thursday.