Chapter 16
There is 50 short in the drawer. Whose problem is that?
Not the till's and not the shift's. Cash belongs to a cash box, and a shortage is a question about that cash box.
The till records what was sold and returned during a shift. The money it takes goes into the cash box the till is set to use, and only that cash box has a balance. A difference is found by counting the cash box against its balance — a separate job, which the product does not yet offer as its own step.
Three separate things
A till is the device at the counter. A shift is a stretch of time on one till: it opens, the till sells, it closes. A cash box is where the money actually is, and it is the only one of the three with a balance — what the books say it should hold.
Each till pays its cash into one cash box. Several tills may use the same cash box; its balance is then theirs together, and no till has a balance of its own.
What a shift tells you
The shift shows what was sold and returned through that till while it was open, by way of payment, and how many documents. Opening it asks for no money and closing it asks for no count; closing it simply ends the window and records nothing in the books.
A sale at the till is paid in full at the moment it is saved and cannot be edited afterwards. A mistake is put right with a return at the till, which keeps the original sale and shows the correction beside it.
Where the 50 is
The cash box's balance says how much cash should be in it, counting every sale, refund and other payment into or out of it. Counting the notes and comparing them with that balance is how a shortage is found.
When several tills share a cash box, a shortage belongs to the cash box, not to one till or one cashier. If you want to know which till a difference came from, give each till its own cash box.
What the product does not do yet
There is no counting step yet: nothing records a count, a shortage or an overage, and nothing moves cash from one cash box to another, for example into the safe. Until it does, a difference you find can be recorded with a manual accounting entry where your plan includes them, and the transfer of cash between boxes the same way.
Differences recorded before this change keep the entries they already have in your books.
The habit
Count each cash box at the same point every day and compare the notes with its balance. A difference found on the day usually has an obvious cause; the same difference found weeks later rarely does.