How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
If your business runs 24/7 how do you balance the till?
As far as I can see, the till balance operation assumes that the business has stopped - ie no more money is coming in and the till contents are not changing.
For a continuous run business, one needs to be able to print the till balance report for a specific time. ie at some time (say 5pm), you empty the till contents into your money bag, and put the float amount back in the till. You then retire to the back office (leaving the front office to continue doing business), count the money bag, and print a till balance report as at 5pm. You also need to be able to apply adjustments with the time set to just prior to the 'as at' time. Then having cleaned things up, you then need to run the 'Clear' operation as at 5pm.
Am I missing something, or do we have to stop the business to balance the till, and keep it stopped until the Clear operation is done?
Regards, Tim G
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
The till is updated whenever a Payment or Refund is finalised, or a Till Balance Adjustment is saved.
When any of these occurs, the payment/refund/adjustment is added to the uncleared Till Balance for the till associated with the payment/refund/adjustment.
If changes are occuring to the till as it is being cleared, the clear till operation should fail and roll back, as the version of the Till Balance in the db will be different to that of the Till Balance used in the clear till operation.
For your situation this isn't ideal. Perhaps we need another Till Balance status indicating 'Clear In Progress'. This would mean that all new payment/refunds are added to a new Till Balance, and thus not affect the one in the process of being cleared.
-Tim A
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Tim A - the practice manager is happy with this mechanism. Please go ahead and create a project for this.
Regards, Tim G
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
I've created the project here: http://www.openvpms.org/project/247-till-balancing
-Tim A
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
I am a bit confused by the Start Clear button - when you click it the Till immediately asks for the current float - if the float is difference from the starting float then an autoadjustment is applied....
When you then press clear the in progress till is cleared to the deposit account...
Why do we need a start clear button...the ONLY thing that slows down clearing a till is counting it...which means you dont want people physically transacting in it anyway...
I must be missing the point ...
It would have made more sense to ask for the FLOAT when the till is finally cleared NOT when you START.
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Ben - I suspect that I need to tweak the CSH text slightly (you did read it didn't you ;-).
Currently step 2 of http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.7/reporting/till says "if business needs to continue, press Start Clear to freeze this till balance and let a new one start so that business can continue".
I suspect that this should be changed to read:
"if business needs to continue, press Start Clear to freeze this till balance and let a new one start so that business can continue. You will be asked to confirm the float amount - remove all the money in the physical till except for the float amount, and put this to one side so that you can count it. If business has stopped for the day, then don't press Start Clear and continue with the next step."
The Hong Kong practice has been using this facility since cutover to OpenVPMS on 6/1/14 (Tim A shipped a snapshot containing it in October 2013) and it works a treat.
Tell me it the adjusted text is OK, and I will update the CSH.
Regards, Tim G
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Yeah thats exactly what I dont get ....you need to count the money BEFORE you press Start Clear.....meaning you need to take the till offline and process no transactions while you do it...IMO this is the only thing that takes staff time when clearing a till apart from that they match the eft transactions usually just checking the totals balance.
So assuming you have counted the money and put the FLOAT in the till and pressed Start clear....by this point the actual cash is now fixed if you find out someone has screwed(wrong change etc) up sure you could do an adjustment but that would reduce the float...
If you find an error - say 10$ put through as cash that should have been EFT you cant actually fix it because in the IN_PROGRESS state you can only do adjustments.
I am failing to see what you need the IN_PROGRESS state for - what can u do while in that state that can fix till errors?
The reason I ask is we operate a 3 shift day - and I cannot work out how using Start Clear helps at all..
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Ben - the way I think of it is like having a bucket under a dripping tap. Pressing Start Clear is like:
a) whipping out the bucket (call it A) and replacing it with a new empty bucket (call it B) which is now ready to catch the new drips
b) the float you set, F, is that for the new bucket B, and so you need to pour F worth of money back into bucket B
c) bucket A now contains the days's takings as at the 'Start Clear' time less the Float, and you can go ahead and count this and make any adjustments - which you are making on bucket A, not B.
Note that you can take hours to do the count, because you are working on bucket A. Bucket B is happily catching the drips from the tap.
Does this clarify the process?
Regards, Tim G
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
I understand what your saying in principal but there is a major flaw...
Tony clarifies that flaw below. IMO you shouldnt have to have counted the till prior to pressing START CLEAR - but I understand that to start a new till that value needs to exist. So I propose the following.
START CLEAR will set the float at the value that it was at the start of SHIFT A(the one we are clearing)
when we eventually clear the FLOAT is asked again - at this point if it differs an AUTOADJUST will be performed on TILL A and TILL B's starting float will be edited to reflext the new start value.
This may mean some changes to business rules. I aslo agree with Tony's assessment (see below)
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Hi Ben and Tim,
I must admit I am struggling with the Start Clear concept as well.
You want to be able to stop posting any new receipts and refunds to the current Till but you still need to the option to fix the current till so that it balances. To do this you not only need to be able to do cash adjustments but also reverse receipts and refunds and post new ones to fix incorrect payment typ eand other errors. If you Start Clear then you dont have the option for the later as these changes go into the new not the old till balance. The new till balance is now incorrect as well so the problems propogate.
Unfortunately until there is a solution to this issue I think the Start Clear feature has very limited use
To solve this I think we need a way to reverse/edit payments and refunds from within the Till Balance workspace so we can directly effect the Till Balance we are balancing/clearing. Thoughts ?
Cheers Tony
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Tony - while I would agree with you in theory (on the limitations of the corrections available once you press Start Clear), we have been using this facility for 6 months. Currently the practice manager is on vacation in Europe - can we suspend discussion until next week when she returns so that we can get some real world input.
I must also admit that when I OK'ed the spec for this feature (we funded it), both Tim A and myself did not think about the problems of correcting a wrong payment type.
I suspect that the easiest approach would be to add a button (say Unclear or Remove) to move a transaction from the 'Clear in Progress' till balance to the 'Uncleared' till balance. This would allow one to move erroneous transactions back into the current working till so that they can be corrected. Thus we have as follows:
However, lets await Trilby's return from Europe.
Regards, Tim G
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Hi Tim,
Happy to wait and discuss but to be honest with you we work directly with many, many practices who are telling me they like the idea in theory but in practice it doesn't work hence my post. All these practices are not using this feature. So something needs to change to meet the requirements of these practices which is simply being able to balance the existing till including reconciling all payment types, not just cash. Leaving an inbalance in the previous till and dealing with it in the next till is not how real world practices and businesses operate IMHO.
Cheers Tony
Re: How to balance a till in a 24/7 operation?
Tony/Ben - you are absolutely correct. It turns out that the staff doing the till balance are functionally balancing the till BEFORE pressing Start Clear. Herewith the input from the practice manager:
"I've just had a good chat with my receptionists who agree with all the points made above. Because we can't correct any transactions after the 'Start Clear' has been pressed, the front line staff make sure the till is counted and everything is correct before they start the process. Which kind of defeats the purpose I suppose. If there could be a way to alter transactions after the 'start clear' has begun then it would be more useful."
This is a wonderful/terrifying example of staff coping with short comings in a system while quietly getting on with their job whereas it would have been better if they had protested loudly.
So we obviously need a mechanism to be able to do corrections to the 'Clear in Progress' till while allowing new receipts to go into the new 'Uncleared' till.
The question is, how best to do this. Logically it is best done in the Till Balance workspace. Reversal is relatively easy - select the required transaction in the 'Clear in Progress' till and press a Reverse button. A reversing transaction is generated in this till.
However, how do we edit a payment, for example to change its payment type? In the customer workspace you reverse the payment and then generate a new one. This suggests that the way to edit a payment during the till clearance is for the edit operation to first generate the reversing transaction and then inject a new payment transaction with the correct amount/type. ie you don't change the original payment transaction - but rather first reverse it and then create the new one.
In summary, if the selected till balance is in the 'Clear in Progress' state and a transaction is selected, then two new buttons are displayed, Reverse & Edit.
The above has not touched on the float question. My feeling is that the current design is correct, in that you set the float for the new till when you press the Start Clear button - but the 'Start Cleaning Till' confirm window should say not 'Cash Float' but rather 'Cash Float for new Till'. In fact the 'Clear Till' confirm windows that is displayed when you press the Clear button could in fact use the same wording.
So for the continuous operation situation, the physical process is a) remove everything from the till except for the new float amount; b) press Start Clear and OK with the new float amount; c) retire to back room to balance the 'Clear in Progress' till using the Adjust, Reverse and Edit buttons.
Note that there is a current project in development http://www.openvpms.org/project/transaction-reversal-suppression to allow you to hide payment/refund pairs created by reversals. I would assume that the pairs created by the Reverse and Edit buttons would have their Hide flags set.
Regards & Apologies for not thinking hard enough in the first place, Tim G