“We are down about forty” is a sentence that means nothing on Monday morning and means quite a lot at 4pm on Saturday. The difference is not the accounting; it is how wide the window was.
Reconcile per shift, per person
At handover, print a summary for that shift and that cashier: what the system says was taken, broken down by tender. Count the drawer. Enter the counted figure. The difference is recorded there and then, with both the outgoing and incoming person present.
That is the entire discipline, and it works because the window is small. Two people, four hours, a couple of hundred transactions — a discrepancy in that window is usually traceable to a specific bill, and often somebody simply remembers. Stretch the same discrepancy across a weekend and six staff and it is untraceable by construction. See permissions and the audit log for the actions worth watching alongside it.
Set the business day to your actual hours
If you serve past midnight — a bar, a barbecue place, a late-night noodle shop — the calendar day is the wrong boundary. Set the business day to something like 06:00 to 06:00 and the 2am bills stay with the night they belong to. Otherwise Saturday’s takings are split across two report lines and Sunday opens with three tables’ worth of revenue it did not earn, which makes every day-on-day comparison you run slightly wrong forever.
This is a store setting, so branches in different countries can each run their own local trading day and their own time zone.
Reconcile against the right number
One trap worth naming, because it produces false accusations. Electronic tenders that settle later — a QR payment scheme that pays out the next working day, a card acquirer that batches — do not appear in your bank account on the day they were taken. Weekend takings can land on Tuesday.
So the daily reconciliation is against the system’s own figure for that tender: the count of transactions and the total for each method, compared with the terminal or the scheme’s own report. The bank balance is a separate, slower check. Using the bank balance as the daily target means blaming staff for a settlement calendar.
Card terminals that do not talk to the till
If the card machine is a standalone unit, the till only knows what the cashier told it. That is workable but you must reconcile the terminal’s own batch report against the card line in the system every day, not weekly. The same applies to tips taken on the terminal: if the terminal prompts for a tip and the till never hears about it, the till’s total is net of tips permanently, the day will not balance, and you have no basis for distributing them. Worth checking before you buy the terminal rather than after.
Outage days
A day where the line was down for two hours still reconciles normally — transactions written offline are part of the shift they belong to and sync afterwards. What changes is the tender mix: card falls to zero during the outage, cash rises. See what happens when the internet goes down.
