Retail - How Do You Cash Out?

I recently had a Christmas job in a computer store. It was not my first time in retail but it was my first time as a retail cashier.

I worked in hotels and other small businesses (part time) where we cashed out but it was fairly simple. We ran a report that said, how much we took in and then counted that amount from our drawer and what was left over should’ve been how much we started out with.

But with this computer store, we were given $500 to start.

Then we worked for 8 hours. If you took in too much money, you just handed your bills to the manager. We didn’t count them. We just gave them to him/her, and then she would go in the office with another manager and they’d count it together.

Then you’d get back a slip of paper saying you gave the manager that much.

At the end of day, you went to the back office and brought up the POS (Point of sale).

You entered your code, and the number of hundreds, fifties, twenties, etc etc, all the way to pennies (and any drops made)

(For instance, if you had 20 one hundred dollar bills, you’d enter 20, not 2,000)

Then when you entered what was in your drawer you hit done.

If it balanced, you were fine, if you were off, even a penny, you’d have to call a manager who’d unlock your code and you’d see how much you were off.

I was just wondering if this was typical of retail places?

It seemed like a pretty bad system. I mean besides the fact you had no real control over your money, if you had to make a drop, (give the manager excess money) and I also didn’t like the fact you didn’t count your money, rather you simply entered the number of bills.

So my question is, if you worked retail, how did you cash out? What was your system like?

And was it a good system or one prone to “errors” or possible theft?

We didn’t cash out individually - every transaction was done under your employee number, but when you were done for the day you just left. You didn’t have a drawer to yourself or anything. Counted up the drawers at the end of the day. Sorry, that’s no help for you.

C-store. We’re not as hard-ass as all that. At shift open, we open the register with $150. As long as it’s within 50 cents of $150, over or under, it’s OK. When we get a hundred dollar bill, or more than about $350 in the register, we do a safe drop on the register, take the receipt, fold it around the money, put it all in a little plastic envelope, and drop it in the safe. On a busy shift, we will do this maybe 50-60 times. At the end of the shift, the register prints out a summary that says how much we are over or short, based on sales vs. drops. As long as the day, all shifts, is within a few bucks, it’s fine. Sometimes people make mistakes, put only 80 in an envelope, or 20 bucks too much. In such cases, it looks like they are 20 over or short, but I or the manager (whoever is counting the cash) finds the error. It almost always evens out. For the month of December, our cash is short just under $50, on about $195,000 in cash bank deposits. That’s pretty good. Plus, our last inventory audit was off by something like .02%.

Joe

When I worked at a grocery store in 1995, we got a drawer when we started and when we were done we took our drawer to the room in the back and slipped it through the hole to whoever was working back there.

I don’t know how much I ever started with or how much I ended with. I never counted any of the money.

I also don’t remember ever being told I was off, so I must have been good (although my primary job was not cashier so I didn’t have 40 hours a week of register time). Or at least good enough.

FWIW our store didn’t accept credit cards and we didn’t have a scanner. It was all old school cashiering!

worked in a service station (combo gas station/garage.) pulling shit from memory, we started with $200 in the till, all transactions were logged, end of shift we left $200 in the till in prescribed quantities in a locked drawer, with the rest dropped in the safe.

The last one, we didn’t have our own drawer or anything like that. We keyed in our employee number for each transaction.

To close the register at the end of the day, we keyed in our employee number and then followed the prompts, basically. How many ones, fives, tens, 20s, 50s, 100s, how many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars (tough shit if someone gave us a Kennedy, had to count that as two quarters, but it was rare). How many checks, and we were supposed to check the amounts.

Then, if it didn’t balance, it would ask you to recount. I never did. I just hit “override.” I am pretty lousy with counting money–counting anything, really–and this was in a jewelry department where as part of closing I’d already had to count every piece of jewelry in every case. I know I screwed up several times–once I mistakenly entered a check as cash, for instance, and I probably shortchanged people or gave them too much on occasion–but I never heard anything about it.

As we closed, the best practice was to stack the bills in reverse order of how they were listed on the computer, i.e., large bills on the bottom. At the end of all this the computer kicked out some kind of a number, which went into the pouch with the cash, the checks, any incentives that had been used during the day. We were also supposed to throw in used-up gift cards but I generally put those right into the trash.

We did not take out the coins. (Good thing too, because those pouches were in terrible shape as it was, and money would have fallen all over the place.)

The place before that was similar except that, after we’d counted it all out, there was a certain amount we were supposed to leave in the cash drawer, and then we locked it, and they key went someplace really safe. The amount to be left in was like the starting amount in Monopoly money, so many fives, so many twenties, so much in change. You were always supposed to have a certain amount of quarters–I think $8 worth–and when you went below that you called a manager for more change. But that went on throughout the day. If you didn’t have that many quarters at closing, you called the manager.