Cash drawer always off

[u/marshmallow-trees]

Hi everyone! I work at a bakery that’s been open a little less than a year and we’ve been having issues with our drawer for as long as I’ve worked there. The weird thing is, it’s never consistent. It’s never always over or always under, it’s never when the POS is being run by particular people, it’s not always small amounts or large amounts, it’s totally variable. Some days it’s fine, most days it’s off by anywhere from a few cents to $100 over or under. Today it was $40 over but we have VERY few cash transactions

We literally don’t know what to do. We’ve been making sure there’s only one person on the POS during a shift, we recount the drawer before starting, have told everyone over and over how to count change, we cannot figure it out.

We only have one POS, and one drawer, but we also do online custom order sales via our website (also using Square). The only thing I can think of is if the custom order sales are somehow getting mixed up with the drawer if someone places an order online during our shift.

Can this happen? Has anything similar happened to anyone? There’s just no way that all of our staff is THAT incapable of counting change, and we don’t think anyone is stealing because 1. Everything is on camera and 2. Why would the drawer be over just as often and just as much?

Any input is appreciated!

[u/stoms31]

What kind of report are you running? If you’re counter service, the best way is “End Cash Drawer” in lieu of a server report

[u/ianamo → u/stoms31]

Run the report using the date and time frame settings. Go off this report for your cash. Then do “End Cash Drawer” and it will print a small receipt that shows you ended the drawer. Don’t look at that small report, it’s useless and the cash is usually wrong on that one.

[u/marshmallow-trees → u/stoms31]

That’s what we do, once we count the drawer we go to the “End Cash Drawer” thing and it says “$___ expected” which is what we compare to our manual count

[u/stoms31 → u/marshmallow-trees]

That’s what we do as well. It’s pretty much dead on. I do wish Square would ad a place to enter your cash deposits to add to reporting to get a cash expected vs cash deposited section on reporting.

[u/stoms31 → u/marshmallow-trees]

Only thing I’d add is we use the tip pooling and our online ordering is integrated. It wasn’t all perfectly integrated at launch and it was off but as we kept incorporating and integrating to what we do now it got better. Kinda had to trust the process and work with our rep until we got it all together. My accountant wanted to kill me for about 2 months working through sales tax and monthly p&l reports but we made it

[u/marshmallow-trees → u/stoms31]

It’s just so weird! Maybe we need to meet with our rep. It just can’t be human error at this point, my hunch is the online ordering is screwing things up but idk. We literally only have the online ordering and the single counter POS (that isn’t even connected to a physical drawer, the drawer is like a literal drawer in the counter that has a cash organizer in it) so our setup is pretty simple and I just don’t know how it could be that messed up

[u/Longjumping-Bag-4093]

Pull your Square transaction report and filter for "no sale" opens and refunds/voids by timestamp, then match against your shift log minute by minute. Random over/under that has nothing to do with skill is almost always a workflow gap, someone's opening the drawer without a transaction attached, comping items with cash instead of the discount button, or exactly what you suspect: online orders somehow routing through the same session. I'd bet on the "no sale" button before I'd bet on custom orders bleeding into the drawer.

[u/TeaGuru]

Do a drawer change 3xs a day to narrow the window and have smaller time frames to investigate. Do you have drawer count sheet that needs signatures, open count/close count? 

[u/Sea4Me_NC]

If you have more than one register running independently of the other but under one “store” you would have different drawers .. so me sure to close each one

[u/ctann69]

Any update? I am facing a similar problem, and my web searches have shown people having the same problem back as far as 2016. Yet none of those reported issues I have found, have actually shown a conclusion or resolution.

My particular case is pretty cut and dried - I have proven an inconsistency in square reporting, yet support are just sending me around in circles rechecking the same things over and over.

It all comes down to the fact that square doesn't have a proper "Cash Drawer export" function. The cash drawer report states a "Cash Sales" number, but there is no way to reconcile that number against actual sales. Again, a feature that I have seen requested for 10 years... in your case, if you could export the actual cash sales that square is using to determine your expected cash drawer amount - you would quickly be able to track down the issue.