Effective cash management is essential for maintaining accurate records, minimizing security risks, and ensuring smooth operations. This guide outlines the process for tracking cash movements using Float In, Float Out, and till skimming techniques. By following these steps, you can ensure that cash is handled securely throughout the shift, discrepancies are avoided, and end-of-day reconciliation is efficient. Whether you're a business manager or staff member, this system helps you maintain control over your daily cash takings and ensures your banking process is clear and accurate.
1. Float In at the Start of the Shift
- At the beginning of the shift, ensure each POS drawer is filled with the appropriate float amount.
- Record this amount using the Float In feature to account for the starting cash balance.
- This helps to establish a baseline, tracking how much cash should be in the system by the end of the day.
2. Process Regular Transactions
- Staff process transactions as usual throughout the shift.
- Sales are made, and cash is collected as payments.
3. Perform a Till Skim (When Cash Accumulates)
- As cash accumulates in the drawer, perform a till skim when the cash becomes too high.
- A till skim is essentially moving excess cash from the POS drawer to a safer, back-of-house location, such as a safe.
- This does not affect your daily takings but helps reduce the amount of cash in the drawer, minimizing security risks.
4. Continue Processing Transactions
- After the till skim, continue processing regular transactions.
- This ensures that normal business operations continue while keeping cash levels manageable in the drawer.
5. End of Day: Count and Perform Float Out
- At the end of the shift or business day, count the cash in each drawer, including the float and any cash moved during the till skim.
- Perform a Float Out to match the theoretical cash (based on sales and skimming) to the actual cash you have on hand.
- This balances the system, ensuring that cash movements are accurately recorded.
6. Determine Bank Deposit
- Use the Float Out to determine the total amount of cash that should be banked from the shift.
- The remaining cash (after subtracting the float and any skimmed amounts) is the actual takings that need to be deposited.
By following this system, you can:
- Keep your cash handling organized and secure.
- Ensure accurate cash reporting for each shift.
- Minimize the amount of cash stored in the front-of-house drawers, reducing security risks.
This process is especially useful for preventing discrepancies and ensuring proper cash management throughout the day, making end-of-day reconciliation and banking more efficient.
This process is explained in detail using screenshots below.
In Impos Back Office, navigate to the POS Functions dropdown, and select Menu Design.
These functions can be added to any screen of your choice. For this example we’ll use the More Func. screen.
In the ‘Searching Criteria’ section, select function from the type dropdown, and add the following to the screen:
- Float In
- Float Out
- Till Skim
You will use this process to balance your till at the end of each shift. If you’ve never balanced your till using Impos, the first step is to complete a float out. This means to count all the cash in your drawer, including the float, at the end of a shift. This will give you some strange results, as the POS will be expecting cash from all shifts that you haven’t ‘floated out’, but this will form the starting point for your cashiering.
A cashiering shift runs from a float in to a float out, and includes all cash payments, cash ins/outs, and cash refunds. To begin the shift, float in, and you’ll see the following screen:
Print out:
This allows your staff members to enter the quantity of each denomination. The POS system will do the calculations required to show how much that represents in monetary value. ‘Other’ is used to represent any additional non-cash monies.
For this example, we’ve input $300 as our float in. To follow this through as a regular shift, we’re going to process $200 in cash sales, bringing our theoretical cash in the drawer to be $500 ($300 float, plus $200 sales = $500).
Next we process a till skim, which facilitates the removal of some cash from the drawer to be stored safely back of house. Select the till skim function and you’ll be presented with a screen that looks very similar to the float in screen, allowing your staff members to input the denominations being removed from the drawer.
You can only perform a till skim on money earned, meaning the float is to be excluded. In our example above, there is currently $500 in the drawer and the float comprises $300 of this, meaning the maximum we can till skim is $200. For this working example, we’re going to skim $120. This means there is now an expected total of $380 in the drawer, and $120 back of house.
At this stage, we’re going to process our float-out to balance the cash expected in our shift. By selecting the float out function you will see the following screen, with cash drawer balancing on the left and till skim balancing on the right.
There are two ways the system can operate in order to perform a till skim.
1) The system can leave the fields blank for a blind cash-up process; or
2) The till skim fields can be pre-populated with the information entered through previous till skims.
In the below example, the process is the same regardless of whether the till skim is pre-populated or not, as you have the ability to edit each of the figures.
We’re going to intentionally show a variance in this example to illustrate the variance functionality. We are entering an actual till total of $375, and a till skim actual of $110.
Print out:
- Till cash - the amount of money in the drawer itself.
- Skim cash - the amount of money that has been skimmed and is no longer in the drawer, but still counts towards the takings.
- Total cash - the amount of money counted in total, including the float and the skim.
- Cash to bank - the amount of money to be taken to the bank, being the total cash minus the float in.
Now that the float-out has been completed, the POS system will prompt for the user to complete a float-in before the next transaction can be processed.
If you have any questions please give Impos Support a call on 1300 780 268.