Tills are a virtual representation of physical cash registers or cash drawers used at sales counters. They provide a control mechanism for opening ‘cash’ floats, reconciling the receipts of payments (cash/card/cheque etc.) and for tracking petty cash transactions.
An unlimited number of Tills can be established as required. Each Till has a Customer, Stock Location, Bank Account and a General Ledger Till Adjustment Account. These settings allow a user to complete a transaction without the need to know what the default customer, stock location or bank are. Even when reconciling tills, users don’t need to know the GL account to post any adjustments to.
A Till Deposit Details Report is available to assist the users reconcile the various tender methods used during the day.
A Till Adjustment procedure is available to enable the users to adjust both total values received during the day and the Tender Types used.
In Point Of Sale (POS), prior to using the main Transaction function, a Till must be selected so that the POS system knows how to record the transactions. A Till must have a status of ‘open‘ before it can be used for transactions. At the end of the day’s trading, the till is ‘closed’ and ‘reconciled’ using the Close Till and Reconcile Till functions and reports.
If it is not practical for the till to be reconciled immediately at the end of the day or shift it is suggested that you create at least two tills for each ‘counter’ so that you can allow time to reconcile a till at the end of a day/session before you need to open it again. Some clients create a different till for each day of the week that they trade. Others have a till per shift i.e. morning, afternoon, evening.
The structure of the Tills and daily reconciliations in your organisation can be tailored to suit your needs with a mixture of Tills and Tender Type settings.
When you’re deciding on how many tills to use, keep in mind that you really want a till to be the responsibility of the Till Operator or the team using the till during a given shift. This is a good reason for have different tills for each shift/team. That way if a discrepancy is uncovered during till reconciliation the ‘team’ can’t easily blame the previous ‘team’ for the issue. Basically, you want obvious “ownership” for the till and all the transactions recorded.
Example
Let’s say you have two physical stores – one in the CBD and one on the North Shore.
The CBD store has two counters, so we’ll set up two Tills in the system – let’s give them code names ‘CBD1’ and ‘CBD2’. The North Shore store is smaller and only has one till – let’s give it a code name of ‘NS1’. Since it is one business, all 3 tills will be posting ‘cash’ receipts into the same bank. The two CBD tills will have the same stock location (“CBD Store”), but the North Shore till will have a different stock location (“North Shore Store”).
At the start of the day, the cashier signs on to POS and chooses which till they are using. Since the chosen till is ‘remembered’ on the device for next time, they really only have to select a till the first time POS is used on a device.
As each sale is made, a transaction is recorded against the customer with the amount of the sale, the inventory at the stock location is adjusted and the payments received are recorded as defined by the Tender Types available. These might be Cash, EFTPOS, Credit Cards, Gift Certificate Redemptions etc.
At the end of trading, a Deposit Details report can be run that will accumulate the days transactions according to the Tender Types defined. The total amount of transactions entered against till code ‘CBD1’ and ‘CBD2’ using the Tender Type Cash can be compared to the physical cash in the till drawer. The total amount recorded as EFTPOS or Credit Cards can be compared to the EFTPOS machine summary. And so on for the other Tender Type Totals. The same reconciliation activity would be performed at the North Shore store using the ‘NS1’ till.
Another Example
You have only 1 store that closes at 5pm each afternoon. The store manager that closes the store finishes at 5pm sharp so there is no opportunity to perform the Till reconciliation. The store is opened at 8am the next morning by a new team. The status of the till from the previous day needs to be preserved to enable the Till reconciliation. The next team could open Till 2 and perform the days transactions using Till 2. During the day the reconciliation can be completed on Till 1 which can be closed and reconciled ready for use again. The next day the team could use Till 1 and Till 2 could be reconciled during the day. Alternatively, you could setup Tills as MON, TUES, WED etc…