Proper closing procedures

If you have happen to have only one POS cashier, I dont think counting between shift is a good idea since it will take sometime and customers are waiting at cashier

I think cash Drop is to add money into the drawer but i may be wrong

Regards. Joie

You would perform a cash drop for different reasons. Assume, for example, you find that there is a large amount of cash in your drawer. For security reasons, you can take some cash out of the drawer and put it in a safer place (i.e. bank). To do this, perform a cash drop. Although the cash is no longer in your drawer, Store Operations will still include that amount in your total sales for the day. You can find this amount displayed on your Z report.

"Joie" wrote:

You are correct about cash drops. They are used throughout the day to prevent having large amounts of cash in the drawer. The amount you pull on a cash drop is in the day's figures, but is not expected in the closing count, so you do not add those cash 'pulls' in when you count out at closing. There is no reason to use a cash drop once you are closing out the drawer.

Your basic outline of procedures is correct, but may vary slightly from store to store. For example, if there is only one cashier, you may not need to count again before opening. If a different cashier is going to use the drawer however, it is a good idea to have them count. This way each cashier is responsible and accountable for their drawer. We always leave $75.00 in the drawer, so we skip entering the drawer opening amounts and don't count the $75 we leave in the drawer after closing out. These are just shortcuts to save time.

Marc

Marc is correct in that you do not use cash drop right before closing. We only use a cash drop when we are minimally staffed and have a large amount of cash in the drawer. For security reasons(if we got robbed we wouldn't lose all the money we dropped out of the drawer)we do a cash drop. There are other considerations to take into account when you consider entering opening and closing amounts. If you are integrated with QuickBooks, depending on your procedures, you may or may not enter open/close amounts. For instance we don't enter opening amounts, but we do enter closing amounts. This is because of the way we, and in turn QuickBooks, are doing certain things when we post to QuickBooks. To learn the proper way to handle things there is a KB article on customersource that explains this. Craig

Jason, Those procedures may work for YOU but will not work for US. I don't even know where to start because hardly anything you've described would work with our procedures. First of all there are different ways to handle your GL account assignments in RMS, these procedures are documented in a KB article on customersource. We follow the one that suits us PERFECTLY. Our accountant has looked over these procedures and has given his blessing. We don't enter opening amounts each day, the same amount is in the drawer every morning. We only do CASH DROPS when the drawer goes above a preset level. We DON'T do a cash drop before entering closing amounts because we are taking the cash out anyway. We do count the drawer and enter closing amounts for each tender, that way Quickbooks knows what gets deposited each day(the cash drops are handled separately). If the drawer does not balance RMS will not allow us to run a Z report until the drawer balances(this feature is set up in cashier limit amounts). We also keep the same amount in our change safe at all times. I'm glad you came up with a procedure that fits you perfectly, but don't assume that's the only way to do it. Craig

It pains me to see this thread. So I feel i must respond. It took me a few year to figure this out...

Proper cash management procedure:

1. Each and every morning for each drawer the cash in the drawer must be counted and entered as opening amounts on EACH register.
2. During the day you will naturally build up cash in the drawer. You take out all 100's 20's and 50's etc. put them in a special cash drop envelope and then do a CASH DROP in the system. This tells the register that the money was taken out and also, very important, will indicate to quickbooks that money has been removed from the drawer and should be deposited at the bank. Quickbooks will have an Undeposited Cash account entry made for each drop and your bookkeeper will then know to look for the cash in the safe and take it to the bank.
3. Before closing you must first DROP cash BEFORE you enter your closing amounts. This is because of # 2 above. Dropped cash will go to the bank usually and if you dont drop it then QB does not expect the deposit.
4. Once most of the cash is dropped leave the 10s 5s and smaller in the drawer and then count the drawer and enter the closing amounts.
5. Run your z report and then see if the drawer is over or short. Or have your partner build you a special cash management report which will detail over short amounts in your drawers. We dont use z report because we built our own reports.

We keep the drawers till the next day untouched so the closing amounts from the night before MUST equal the opening amount the next day. This keeps us from having to deal with coins. Coins stay in the drawer. We get change from our change safe which ALWAYS has the same amount of cash in it which means a roll of quarters into the drawer a 10 into the change safe.

This is the proper way to deal with your cash. We have 9 registers in

Jason

$200 is also the amount we keep in our drawer. The main reason for making the exact amount each day is to be able to settle any disputes that may arise. For instance, a customer says they paid with a $20 and you gave them change for a $10. With the opening amount being exactly $200 we can count the drawer and are able to see if we made a mistake, or if the customer is trying to pull one over on us. You are correct in that we have the closing amounts go into undeposited funds account, it then gets distributed to the correct accounts from there. By requiring the drawer to be even, we make sure the tenders are going to match what gets posted into Quickbooks(which is a royal pain in the ass to catch and fix if it doesn't). If they don't match, RMS won't let you run a Z to close the batch(we run an X first so we know what's been entered into POS). Usually, for us anyway, it's off because someone put a sale under cash when it was really a credit card, or vise-versa(we use a standalone terminal). By requiring the tenders to match we can go back in and correct the tender amounts to match what it really should be. This way the posting to Quickbooks is always accurate. Which is really important to me, especially if I post a bunch of batches at once. I feel like you do if the drawer is over/short a few dollars, it's just not a huge deal for me. Keep in mind though, I only have one store with a small staff. I'm sure a large operation with many stores and employees would have to keep track of over/shorts, which would probably alter some of these procedures. BTW, I know this is a group for RMS issues, but I really appreciate reading how other retailers, like you, handle different day to day operations, not just RMS issues. It helps to keep me on my toes, and I can evaluate what I am doing versus how others do things. This newsgroup has been a godsend to me, and I'm sure many others. Happy Holidays to everyone, good luck in the new year, and keep up the good work. Craig

"greenegrape" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@s9g2000prm.googlegroups.com... On Dec 8, 12:25 pm, "Craig" wrote:

You procedure make total sense to me. But, I have decided I don't want to have staff counting coins for all our drawers each day. It is a lot of work to make a drawer an exact amount each day. So we leave the drawers around $200 bucks. Basically we take out all the big bills and leave everything else in the drawer. Also, the way our GL is set up means that only drops will show up in our undeposited funds account. You probably have it set up so that closing amounts go into that account as well which is something i never thought about but plan to think about. However, Im not sure how over short maps to the GL in that situation. I also didn't know you could require a drawer to be even. What do you do when it is not? We do 700 transactions a day in one store and they always screw things up. But when the drawers are over or short under $20 i don't really care.

The reason i wrote my response in such a way above was because i wanted to start a real debate with people who actually know about this stuff. What you have told me is going to make me rethink how I do things because my way is not perfect. Having to verify opening amount equal closing amounts from the night before is not always easy to keep on top of.

Is there anyone else out there who has a good cash management procedure that is foolproof and not labor intensive?

Jason