Chapter 21
Do I really have to count the drawer every night?
Yes — but what you count is a cash box, not a till. And the reason is not distrust of your staff: a difference found tonight has an obvious cause, and the same difference found in three weeks does not.
A cashier rings up a sale in cash but the customer actually paid by card, and nobody notices for a month. By then the cash box has taken money from many shifts, perhaps from several tills, and nobody can say which day it happened. Counted every night, it is one day and one conversation.
What counting actually protects
It is not really about catching theft, though it does that too. Most differences are mistakes: a wrong key pressed, a refund given in cash for a card sale, a note handed back as change twice. None of these are dramatic, and all of them are cheap to fix on the day and expensive to unpick later.
What you compare
Compare the notes and coins in the cash box with the cash box's balance in your reports. That balance counts everything that went into or out of the box: every till that uses it and every other receipt or payment.
Do not compare them with one shift's figures. A shift shows only what its own till did while it was open, and a cash box shared by two tills holds the money of both.
If the two numbers disagree
Closing a shift never waits for a count, so the till is never held up at the end of the day. The product does not yet have a counting step of its own: write down the cash box, the day and the amount, and record the difference with a manual accounting entry where your plan includes them.
Most differences explain themselves within a day or two, once somebody remembers what happened. The ones that do not are exactly the ones worth a proper look.