What to do if you are having trouble balancing

There are three unwanted situations that can occur when you do your end of day processing. They are as follows:

Some of the possible causes of these issues are:

1. Sale and payment records have been entered that do not correspond to a physical sale.

Usually caused by a customer changing their mind after the transaction has been entered, and the staff member either not knowing how to or being unable at the time to process a reversing transaction. At the very least, it would be good to encourage your staff to physically write down information about such occurrences. The person performing the end of day processing can then go and process the reversing transactions, or take the amounts into account when completing their balance sheet.

2. Missing cash or vouchers.

Your till is actually short of physical cash; one or more cheques are missing; or an EFTPOS transaction has not been processed (or a physical slip is missing for non-electronic credit card transactions).

The most important point here is that staff ensure that they only process payment on a sale when they are physically tendering the type and amount being entered into the system. Such a situation may arise on purpose by a mal-intentioned staff member, but it could also be accidental, especially when a bill is paid by multiple people (and they are in a hurry to leave), that is, one physical transaction is processed in the system but several different tender methods are accepted. For these situations, staff must use the split payment tender method and only finalise the payment when the balance is correct.

The number one suggestion here is to make sure your staff understand the importance of taking time to ensure what they are entering is the same as what they are receiving. Note that there is no way for the computer to make sure a person physically puts an amount in the till.

3. Amount tendered not entered.

A common occurrence is for money to be accepted but for it not to be applied to the appropriate sale. This is usually caused by the till being in use by another staff member, or perhaps a technical problem with the till itself (no paper, system crash etc.).

4. Incorrect tender method selected.

Another common occurrence is for the incorrect tender method to be selected, especially when busy. Once again, not a lot can be done about this except to ensure that staff are aware of the importance of correctly identifying the type of tender being collected.

5. Training records.

If you do not run a separate database for training staff, entering practice transactions will affect your end of day totals that the reports produce. Any transactions of this nature should be recorded separately and reversed at the end of the day, or even better, immediately after the training session ends.

6. Trading across more than one calendar day.

Each sale/invoice and payment is recorded at a particular date and time. The current Balance Till Report shows all of the transactions during a single calendar day. If you trade past midnight, you will need to take into account the overlap between the two days. Two methods to get around this are:

With this method you balance the till at midnight and any sales after midnight are included in the next day’s sales and balance. This is usually the easiest method for staff to deal with. If you are unable to balance the till at midnight, then the second method would need to be used.

You need to print the balance report for the physical calendar day and then do another report at the time of closing past midnight. You will then need to manually add the totals from the two reports to arrive at the amounts to be compared with your physical till.

At the end of the 2^nd day you will need to subtract the amounts from the previous “2^nd report” from the total reported on the 2^nd day’s balance report.