Daily operations
How to run the cash close in a Guatemalan restaurant
The FlowPOS product team
The cash close is the moment you find out whether the shift ended clean or whether something went missing along the way. In a restaurant it gets complicated because cash is not the only thing coming in: there are cards, tips, split bills, and orders settled at the table rather than at the till.
This guide is the full procedure: what to count, in what order, how to reconcile it against the system, and what to check when it does not balance.
Before counting: actually close the shift
The most common mistake is not miscounting. It is counting too early.
Before opening the drawer, make sure no bill is still open. A table that has already left but whose bill is still open in the system does not appear in the shift report — so that table's cash is in the drawer and the sale is not in the total. That is the large discrepancy, and it is almost always this one.
The same goes for takeaway orders paid at the till and left unclosed, and for split bills where one part was charged and the other is still pending.
What to count, and in what order
- Physical cash. Count the whole drawer, including the float you opened with. Count it twice, and if you can, have someone else do the second count.
- Subtract the opening float. What is left is what the shift actually took. If the float is not documented, the close has already gone wrong: there is no way to know what was there before.
- Card slips. Add up the receipts and compare against the terminal's own report, not against what you remember. If the terminal batches out at a different hour than the shift ends, that timing gap explains discrepancies that look like theft.
- Tips. Separate them before reconciling. Left in the mix, cash will always come out over, and you will spend twenty minutes hunting an error that does not exist.
- Other payment methods. Transfers, vouchers, house credit. Each on its own.
Reconciling against the system
The system tells you how much should be there in each payment method. The close is comparing those figures against what you counted — per payment method, not as a single total.
This is the most important thing in the guide, so it is worth repeating. Balancing the total instead of the breakdown hides the most common restaurant error: a sale taken in cash but recorded as card.
| Payment method | System | Counted | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash | Q4,200 | Q4,500 | +Q300 |
| Card | Q3,100 | Q2,800 | −Q300 |
| Total | Q7,300 | Q7,300 | Q0 |
The total is perfect. Both payment methods are wrong. If you only read the last row, you close the shift convinced it balanced.
When it does not balance
A small difference — a few quetzales — is nearly always change given incorrectly. It is not worth chasing; it is worth recording.
A large one has more specific causes. Check in this order, because it is ordered by how often each turns out to be the answer:
- Open bills that were never closed. Mentioned above, and still first.
- A sale recorded against the wrong payment method. Look for two differences of the same amount with opposite signs, as in the table above.
- Voids during the shift. A void done after the cash was already in the drawer leaves the money in and the sale out.
- Manually applied discounts. If someone discounted a bill without recording it as a discount, the system expects the full amount.
- Tips paid out of the drawer. If card tips are paid in cash at the end of the shift, that cash left and has to be accounted for.
What to record
When you close, write down:
- The counted amount per payment method
- The difference, even when it is zero
- Who ran the close, and at what time
- The float left for the next shift
- A short note if it did not balance, and what you found
A close with no recorded difference is not a balanced close — it is a close nobody knows anything about. Recording a zero is what turns the zero into information.
Why close per shift rather than per day
In a restaurant running two shifts, reconciling once at the end of the day means any discrepancy is spread across six or eight people and can no longer be reconstructed. Closing per shift keeps the difference scoped to whoever was on the till.
This is not about distrust. It is that a Q300 difference within one shift is an error someone still remembers; the same difference at the end of the day is a mystery.
The pattern worth reading weekly
An isolated difference is noise. The trend is what tells you something.
If cash comes up consistently short on the same shift, look at the change-giving process and who opens the drawer. Consistently over is almost always tips separated badly. Differences that appear only on the busiest days point at haste — bills closed by eye during the peak.
None of the three is visible in a single close. They appear when you put seven closes side by side, which is why recording the difference matters even on the days it was zero.
With more than one location the useful comparison is between equivalent shifts at each branch rather than between whole locations — the view that multi-location covers.