The "Cash Log" is actually your "Final Financial Declaration" for the day for your venue, and is key to financial transparency. This article explains the inputs.
Last updated 11 July 2024
Jump to:
- Introduction
- Completing your Cash Log
- Final Financial Declaration
- Completed Cash Log
- Banking your Cash
Introduction
This article covers three elements of your Daily Tasks in further detail. For further detail, we would suggest reading the Daily Task section from the beginning:
There are then further articles covering Safe and Till Logs, Hours Worked, and Incidents, Petty Cash, Handover.
Completing your Cash Log
Before you begin, you will need to have performed a Z-Read on your tills (and your PDQ's). You only need to do this process on one till, which will process all tills in the venue:
Find out more information about the Z-Read here.
You will not be able to close the session (Z-read) till if you have open tabs with credit on them, if the EPoS Session Credit Control option is selected in Venue Settings.
Warning: If your till session is not closed (ie. a Z-Read performed), and you continue to trade the following day, your data from both days will be merged on the same session. There is no method for us to split this, and you will have to complete one Cash Log for both days. Therefore the Cash Log figures will show on the second day, for both days' trade. However, Sales Reports will still show correctly.
Final Financial Declaration / Cash Log
The left-hand column marked green above is the 'should have' column, meaning that these are the figures pulled through from the till Z-Read. So this is what Kobas thinks you should have, based on all the till button presses.
The middle column, marked in red above, is the column that you fill in, so this is your 'actually have'. This is where you will put the cash takings first (over and above the Till Float), and then the readings from your PDQ z-read.
The final, right-hand (blue) column is where Kobas automatically calculates the difference between the should and actual, and shows you any variance that you have.
If you would like further detail on each field on this screen, please give this article a read.
Before you save your declaration, you must enter a unique value for Cash Bag #, this will help distinguish your cash bags once they have been banked.
Settings: There are two important settings regarding Card Machines / PDQ that will affect how you input data. If you go to Administration > Venue Settings > Settings > PDQ's, you will see you can select whether American Express (Amex) and Tips are either:
- Not accepted
- Declared separately to the Grand Total (with this setting, you enter one amount for your sales/main total, and one amount for your tips/Amex)
- Declared as a subset of the Grand Total (with this setting, you enter the full amount, then the Amex/tips amount underneath)
A note on multiple Z Reads to reconcile
The Z Read of a till is the mechanism to Close Session, meaning the totals will reset. Within Kobas, this doesn't need to link with a set day, though it will for most of our clients. Some clients may Z Read after a Lunch service, before dinner, or between staff members' shifts.
After the session is closed, Closing Tasks are required to reconcile the Z Read's Expected takings, with the actual takings. Therefore, when closing tasks are completed, given the above, there could be more than one Z Read available to reconcile. In these circumstances, the following screen will appear:
It's worth noting that Closing Tasks are day-specific, and can only be completed once a day. Here you have two options:
- Choose one of the Z Reads to reconcile in these tasks; or
- Choose both of the Z Reads to reconcile together.
Completed Cash Logs
Once you have completed your Cash Log, you can access the historically completed logs through Daily Tasks > Cash Logs, and by default, will show Cash Logs for all venues, which can be filtered down as needed.
Note: You can set in Kobas System Preferences a certain number of days after it's completion that a Cash Log can be edited for. You can also set a User Permission Level that allows certain staff to edit the Cash Log at any time.
When you view the Cash Log in detail, you will also be able to see an audit trail of who has made changes to the figure, and when.
Note: The Support Help Desk has the ability to Bulk Upload historic Cash Log data (a total Gross Revenue figure per day) which will allow you to see "Last Year" comparative figures if you have used Kobas for less than one year.
Banking Cash Bags
Kobas can help you track your Cash Bags after they have been declared, through to banking and appeared in your account.
Top Tip:
EPoS Sessions need to be closed (Z-Read) and committed to a Cash Log (Closing Tasks) within three months of the date of closure of the session.
After this time, the information is stored only in the Cash Log within Cloud and we cannot change this information. This is because we remove old data from your EPoS Server so we aren't duplicating data storage, to keep system performance optimal, and the Cloud has more robust redundancy features.
Therefore, we suggest completing Closing Tasks as soon as possible, and regular downloads/Exports to your account systems to ensure any issues can be resolved in this time frame.
Take a look at Cash Log Report explained for further detail.
Also read: Take a look at our Other Payment Types article and consider if you need to set any custom payment types.