Anything To Declare, Sir?

The traditional end-of-day routine in hospitality goes something like this: the manager hits End of Day, the report prints, somebody counts the cash, somebody else writes a figure on a piece of paper, and the till goes home with whoever locks up. The next morning a different person opens the till, takes out a float that they think is roughly the right amount, and starts trading.

It works. Mostly. Until the day the cash doesn't add up and there are four people who could plausibly have been responsible, no record of what was in the drawer when the shift started, and a phone call from the area manager that begins "we're £80 down — can you tell me when that happened?". And nobody can.

v1.5.17 adds two small, optional features that collectively close that loop. Neither is glamorous. Both make the till behave like the regulated piece of equipment it actually is, rather than the loosely-supervised cash pile it sometimes ends up being.

Opening Float — start every shift on a known number

In Back Office → POS Settings → Cash Handling there's a new toggle: Enter Float at Shift Start. Flip it on and the next operator to sign on after an EOD report is stopped at a single-purpose modal: How much cash is in the drawer right now?

• The modal is mandatory. There's no Skip, no "remind me later". Until the operator types a figure and confirms, the POS is unusable. If they're £4.97 short of the expected float, that's a conversation to have with the previous shift, not a reason to dismiss the prompt.
• The cash drawer opens automatically when the modal appears (if a drawer is configured) so the operator can physically count what's in it before typing the figure.
• The declared float is written to the cloud under floats with a timestamp, the staff member who entered it, and the device it came from. There is a permanent, attributable record of the till's opening state.
• The figure prints on the next EOD report as Opening Float, so the bottom-of-shift reconciliation has a real anchor to start from rather than a hopeful "assumed £100" line.

The simplest way to think about it: before this, the till's starting balance every morning was an unverified assumption. Now it's a signed declaration.

Tender Declaration — the close-of-shift counterpart

The companion toggle, Tender Declaration at End of Day, lives right next to the Float setting. Switch it on and the EOD report doesn't print straight away — instead, the operator is presented with a count-up modal asking for two figures:

• How much cash is in the drawer (count it)
• How much card was taken (read from the terminal or the EFT report)

The operator types the actual counted figures. The POS then prints the EOD report with three lines per tender:

CASH
  Expected      £842.40
  Declared      £838.50
  Variance      -£3.90

CARD
  Expected      £1,204.17
  Declared      £1,204.17
  Variance        £0.00

Two figures — what the POS thinks should be there, and what the human says is actually there — and the difference between them, signed. If the variance is zero you've had a tidy shift. If it isn't, you have an exact figure to investigate, attributed to the person who closed the till.

As with the float, it's one-shot — once submitted, that figure is the figure. No do-overs after seeing the expected total, no "let me just recount that". The intent is to capture an honest read of what's actually in the drawer, not to fish for a number that matches.

Why bother?

Both features are optional. A small café with one person running the till every day for three years probably doesn't need either of them — the chain of custody is already obvious. The features earn their keep in venues where they don't:

• Shift handovers. Two operators sharing one till across a split shift means two opportunities for "I thought it was you who took the £20". With Float + Declaration, each shift starts and ends with a signed figure. The blame stops at the variance.
• Multi-staff venues. Six bartenders, one till, a busy Friday night. The closing variance is now permanently attributed to the closing bartender — and to a known starting figure. Investigations are about a specific shift, not "the week as a whole".
• Insurance and audit. A documented chain of custody is the difference between "we lost £400 last Tuesday" and "we lost £400 last Tuesday — here's the EOD report showing it, and here's the next morning's float entry confirming the till started low". Insurers, accountants and auditors all prefer the second sentence.
• Cash-skim deterrent. The hardest till to skim from is the one where every shift starts and ends with a typed figure attributable to a named person. The Tender Declaration doesn't catch theft directly — but knowing it exists changes the calculation for anyone considering it.
• Dispute resolution. "The deposit slip was £100 short" is a much shorter conversation when both ends of the shift have a declared figure with a staff name attached. The bank, the takings, the EOD report and the next morning's float should all reconcile to the same total — and if they don't, you know which leg of the chain to look at.

Where it shows up in Back Office

Both toggles live in Back Office → POS Settings → Cash Handling. Off by default. Flip whichever ones you want (you can run with just Float, just Declaration, both, or neither) — tenant-wide, so all POS devices on the account behave the same way. Changes propagate via the cloud and take effect on each POS at next sign-on. No app restart needed.

The Opening Float collection (floats) shows up nowhere new in Back Office for v1 — it's stored, dated and attributed, and printed on the EOD that follows it, but there's no dedicated "Float History" page yet. If tenants find themselves wanting one, it's a small addition that we'll bolt on when there's a real use case. The Tender Declaration variance, similarly, prints on EOD but doesn't roll up into a separate report — every EOD already is the report.

Available on every POS

Float and Tender Declaration ship in v1.5.17 of every POS app — Web POS, Windows POS, Android POS, iPad POS. The toggles live once in Back Office; the modals, the cash drawer kick, the EOD print lines and the cloud write all flow from there.

The features don't make the till any harder to operate. They add about fifteen seconds at the start of a shift and another thirty at the end. What they add to the business — a documented, attributable, dated chain of custody for every penny that passes through the drawer — is worth considerably more than the time it costs to declare it.

Anything to declare, sir? Yes — that.