My Bookkeeping Online Blog

It is important to have good control over your tills. Here are a few ideas:

1. Always have enough change, particularly at your busiest times. Running out of change is a nightmare – it wastes time while you fix it, annoys your customers and ultimately costs money. When I owned a pub, we were always busiest at weekends, so we organised the week’s change order each Friday (always ordering 25% more than we thought we needed) and then we topped up after the weekend if we needed to.
2. Reset the tills every night. It is a great discipline, because you find out much more quickly if there is a problem. Busy outlets reset the tills after each shift.
3. Remember that overs are as bad as unders. An over could mean that a customer has been overcharged (which is never good news) or that a sale has not been rung through the till (which will affect your stock control).
4. Train your staff and trust them. Most people are inherently honest and keen to take on responsibility.
5. Make one person responsible for the safe keys.
6. If you have a busy outlet, where lots of change is needed at peek times, have a bucket under the till with extra float. This will mean that tills can be quickly replenished with more change, and you don’t have to keep customers waiting.
7. Have enough tills to meet demand. Tills are expensive, but so is not selling to customers when they are ready to buy.
8. If at all possible, don’t make payments to suppliers from the till, or from the safe. Whilst it is tempting to avoid paying cash to the bank, and therefore not pay bank charges, it is my view that the extra bookkeeping and the demands of reconciling the safe regularly works out to be more expensive.
9. When you do bank, use a separate payslip for each day’s take. This makes it much easier to match the cash arriving on the bank statement with the sales figure from the z-read.

How to use My Bookkeeping Online to record sales:

1. Book the sales (as recorded on the till) in My Sales using Add Cash Sale
2. The first time you Add Cash Sale, you will need to add a service – call it “Daily Take” or whatever is appropriate for you. You can break the day’s take down into as many categories as you wish.
3. When the cash receipt appears on the bank statement, match the cash receipt to the sale using the Match To area in the middle box of the bank screen.
4. If you have taken money from the till/safe for your own use, record it using Add Cash Received.
5. If you have paid suppliers using cash from the till, record this using Add Contra
6. Finally, if book any overs/ unders using Add Contra, selecting the category “overs/unders”

Categories:Bookkeeping, Small Business Help, Start ups