Open & close your cash drawer

Swann Retail keeps a cash drawer session (a “till”) so the cash in the drawer is accounted for from open to close. You need the Sell permission to use the till’s controls.

To find them on the Register screen, open the ☰ menu and choose Till. A till bar with Open till, or Cash in/out and Close till, appears under the top bar. On the tablet, the till bar stays on screen for as long as the till is open.

Open the till

At the start of the day (or shift), press Open till:

1. Count the cash already in the drawer.
2. Enter it as the Opening float (and an optional note).
3. Press Open till.

There’s one open till per register at a time.

Opening a till is optional by default — you can require one before cash sales (or all sales) are rung with the Cash control setting under Settings → Business.

One drawer rung from several devices

If a second device rings for the drawer’s station (see Share one drawer between devices), the two devices share one till, not one each:

• Open it once. Opening the till on either device opens the station’s till, and both then ring into it.
• Every sale counts towards it — cash and card, from whichever device rang it — so the cash a back-office computer takes is expected in the drawer it was walked to.
• Close it once. One count, one Z-report, covering the sales from every device that rang for the station.

If two devices share a till, cash in, cash out and closing the till only work on the device that opened it. Use that device, or close the till there and open it on this one.

A device that doesn’t ring for another station keeps its own till, as above.

When the till is closed

If your Cash control setting needs an open till for a payment and the till is closed, the payment is refused with a message that names the till — the station’s name, where the device rings for a shared drawer — and an Open the till button beside it. You’ll see it wherever that payment is taken: ringing up a sale, collecting a balance on an order, settling a restaurant tab, or turning a quote into a sale. A cash refund is gated the same way — a return, or cancelling an order and refunding its deposit — because that cash comes out of the drawer.

• Press Open the till, count the float as usual, and press Open till. On a device that rings for another station, that opens the station’s till — the one the drawer belongs to.
• Then take the payment again.

If only cash needs an open till, the message offers the other way out too — for example “Open the Front counter till before taking cash, or take this payment by card or cheque.” A refund has no other way out, so it only asks you to open the till: “Open the till before paying out this refund.”

Cash in and out during the day

To put money in or take it out — a supplier paid in cash, change brought in, a petty-cash payout — press Cash in/out:

1. Choose Paid in or Paid out.
2. Enter the Amount and a short note (e.g. “paid supplier”).
3. Press Record.

Every movement is counted in the close, so the drawer always reconciles.

Open the drawer without a sale (no-sale)

To pop the drawer when you’re not ringing up a sale — to give change, or to settle up at shift change — press Open drawer in the top bar of the Register screen. On the tablet, press No sale next to Cash drawer, then Open drawer. The drawer opens, and nothing is recorded: no sale, and no cash movement in the till. The close doesn’t count drawer opens, so if you put cash in or take cash out while the drawer is open, record it with Cash in/out — otherwise the close shows the drawer as over or short.

The drawer is hardware, so Open drawer only opens a drawer that’s actually connected — drawers plug into a receipt printer. See Receipts — print, reprint & email for printer and drawer setup.

Close the till (Z-report)

At the end of the day, press Close till:

1. Count all the cash in the drawer.
2. Enter the total as Counted cash (and an optional note).
3. Press Close & reconcile.

The Z-report opens automatically with the day’s figures:

Line	What it shows
Opening float	What you started with.
Cash sales	Cash taken in sales.
— of which deposits	How much of Cash sales was deposit money — see below.
Cash refunds	Cash paid back out in refunds.
Paid in / Paid out	Cash you added or removed during the day.
Expected in drawer	What the drawer should hold.
Counted	What you actually counted.
Over / short	The difference — Over if you have more, Short if less, Balanced if they match.
Card sales	Card payments taken in sales.
Card refunds	Card payments paid back out in refunds.
Cheque sales	Cheques taken in sales.
Cheque refunds	Cheques paid back out in refunds.

The last four sit below the over/short, under a Record only — not in the drawer heading — that money never went through the cash drawer, so it isn’t part of the count. They’re always listed, even at $0.00, and that zero is worth reading — see below.

Review the figures on screen and press Done to close it.

Re-open a past Z-report

Closing the till is the only thing that produces a Z-report, but past ones stay reachable. Open Till history from the Reports menu — or use the Past closes link on the till bar of the Register screen (reveal the bar from the ☰ menu’s Till row if it isn’t on screen). Till history lists every till this store has closed, newest first, with its Expected, Counted and Over / short. Press Z-Report on a row to re-open that close’s report and Print it again — it’s the same report with the same figures as the one that opened at close, down to the currency it was counted in. If the print doesn’t start, you’ll see The print didn’t start with a Retry button — check your printer (and that your browser isn’t blocking the print dialog), then press Retry.

Two things to know about it. You need reporting access to use the link, so a cashier without it won’t see one. And a re-opened Z-report is a copy to read and print, not a copy to work on — the held-offline-sales note and its Reconcile buttons (below) appear on the close-time report only.

Deposit cash is already inside Cash sales

When you take a deposit on a custom order (Deposits & balances), that cash goes into the drawer like any other cash sale — so it’s already counted in Cash sales. The — of which deposits line tells you how much of that figure it was, which is the number you need when you’re separating the day’s finished sales from money taken against work that isn’t paid off yet.

It is a breakdown of the line above it, not an amount to add on. Adding it to Cash sales counts the same money twice and puts your day out by the value of every deposit you took. It doesn’t change Expected in drawer or the over/short either, because that cash is already in both — it’s in the drawer, and it’s in the figure the drawer is checked against.

A cash payment counts as a deposit here if it didn’t pay the order off — there was still a balance owing after it. So a deposit you take in the morning still shows on that day’s Z-report even if the customer comes back the same afternoon and settles up: it was a deposit when the drawer took it. The payment that clears the balance isn’t a deposit, however it’s paid. The line is always shown, so $0.00 means no deposit cash went through that drawer that day.

Card and cheque totals don’t affect over/short

If you record card or cheque payments at the register, the Z-report lists Card sales / refunds and Cheque sales / refunds below the over/short, under a Record only — not in the drawer heading. They’re there so you can tie the day out against your own card terminal and your cheques — but they don’t count towards Expected in drawer or the over/short. That money never passes through the cash drawer (your standalone card machine and the bank handle it), so only the cash movements decide whether the drawer is over or short.

Those lines are also how you catch a payment rung under the wrong tender. A cheque taken as Cash lands in Cash sales, so Expected in drawer goes up by money that was never in the drawer — you count the cash, the count is right, and the report still reads short by the amount of that cheque. The day’s takings are correct; only the split between the lines is wrong. So when a drawer reads short, read the tender lines before you recount: Cheque sales at $0.00 on a day you know you took a cheque is the tell, and the shortage will match that cheque. It works the same way for a card payment rung as cash.

Over/short only counts reconciled cash

A sale rung offline on the tablet that reaches Swann Retail after its drawer’s Z-report was already cut is held for a supervisor to reconcile on the next close (see Reconcile offline sales at close) — its cash is not folded into Expected in drawer.

The money itself is real and it went into a drawer, so whichever close counts that drawer counts it: it lands in Counted while Expected in drawer doesn’t know about it yet, and the drawer reads over by roughly the amount of the held sale. Reconcile it from the offline-sales note on the Z-report and its cash is acknowledged into the day’s totals.

It only ever runs in that direction. A held offline sale can make a drawer read over; it can never make one read short, because offline queueing is for sales — and a sale puts cash in. So if a drawer is short while an offline sale is waiting to be reconciled, the two aren’t connected: count it again and treat the shortage as real.