Your day at the register

The Register is the till screen your staff use all day. It’s built for a touchscreen at the counter, separate from the back office — staff sign in here with a PIN (not an email login), ring up sales, take returns, and square up the cash drawer. This page is the tour; the detailed how-tos are linked from each step.

The web register needs an internet connection to ring a sale — there’s no offline queue in the browser. Selling through a dropped connection is a tablet POS feature; see Working offline on the tablet.

The register opens to a PIN pad. Each employee has their own PIN (set up under Settings → Users → Register), so the sale, the till movements, and the Z-report are all tied to whoever’s on. Tap in your PIN to start your shift.

The register’s other screens and controls — such as Returns, Orders and the Till — are in the ☰ menu at the left of the top bar. It only lists what your role and plan allow.

Open the till

Before you take any cash, open the till with the cash you’re starting with (the float). Open the ☰ menu and choose Till to bring up the till’s controls under the top bar. See Open & close your cash drawer for the full steps.

Ring up sales

This is the day job — build the cart and take payment:

Ring up a sale — scan or search items, add custom lines, apply a discount.
Take cash & finish the sale — enter the cash, give change, complete.
Receipts — print, reprint, or email a receipt.

Started a sale but need to serve someone else first? Open the cart’s Actions menu and choose Hold sale. The sale waits in Held sales until you come back to it and press Resume:

On the web register, held sales show in a Held sales row under the top bar. The row only appears while a sale is held.
On the tablet, a Held chip with the number of held sales appears in the top bar. Tap it to see them.

Cash in, cash out, and the drawer

Cash in / out — record cash that moves through the drawer outside a sale (paying a supplier, adding change). See Open & close your cash drawer.
Open drawer (on the tablet, No sale) — pop the cash drawer without a sale, for example to give change. Nothing is recorded, so if cash goes in or out, record it with Cash in / out to keep the drawer reconciling.

Take a return

Open the ☰ menu and choose Returns to refund a past sale right from the register — search for the order and process it. The refund is paid from the drawer and shows on your Z-report. See Returns & refunds for the full walkthrough.

Switch user or lock between shifts

Press Lock in the top bar when you step away or hand over. The register goes back to the PIN pad, and whoever taps in their PIN next takes over — that’s how you switch user.

Finish or park the current sale before you press Lock — the Lock button won’t lock with a cart that still has something to charge, so an open sale can’t get stranded under the wrong person. The tablet’s automatic locks, below, don’t wait for you: they hold the sale for you and then lock.

The tablet locks when you leave the register

On the tablet, the register also locks itself when you leave it — for example to open Settings, the item catalog, or the back-office screens of the app. When you come back, the register is on the PIN pad, and you enter your PIN again to carry on. This stops anyone else at the counter from using the tablet as you after you’ve walked away from the register.

A sale you were building isn’t lost: it’s moved to Held sales, ready to Resume once you’ve entered your PIN.
If a card payment is still going through when you leave, the register waits for it to finish and then locks.
Moving between the register’s own screens — such as Returns, Orders, or a customer’s history or Quotes opened from the register — doesn’t lock it.

The tablet locks when nobody’s using it

The tablet also locks on its own if it’s left alone, so a cashier who walks away from the counter isn’t left signed in:

After 2 minutes with no taps or typing, the register goes back to the PIN pad. Any tap or keystroke starts the 2 minutes again, so it won’t lock while you’re working.
Straight away if the app leaves the screen — for example when you switch to another app or the tablet’s screen turns off.

Like leaving the register, these locks move a sale you were building to Held sales, so you can Resume it once you’ve entered your PIN, and they never lock in the middle of a card payment. The web register doesn’t lock on its own; press Lock when you step away.

If your permissions change during a shift

If an owner or manager changes your role while you’re signed in, the register keeps working from your old permissions until you sign in again. When you try something the new role doesn’t allow — charging a sale, closing the till, taking a return — you’ll see “Your permissions changed. Re-enter your PIN to continue.” with a Re-enter PIN button, instead of an error to retry. Tap Re-enter PIN and sign back in with your PIN; the sale you were building is parked rather than lost, and the register now follows your new role. If you still can’t do it, ask a manager. On the tablet, the same message can appear on the “waiting to sync” banner — see Working offline on the tablet.

Close the till

At the end of the day, close the till: count the cash, enter it, and Swann Retail produces the Z-report showing your float, cash sales, refunds, paid in/out, and whether the drawer is over or short. Full steps are in Open & close your cash drawer.

Reconcile offline sales at close

On the tablet POS, a sale you ring while the internet is down catches up on its own once you reconnect (see Working offline on the tablet). If one of those queued sales reaches Swann Retail after the drawer’s Z-report was already cut, its cash isn’t quietly folded into the totals — it’s set aside on the next close for a supervisor to check first, so the day’s cash is never adjusted behind your back.

When that happens, the Z-report shows a note under the cash figures: “N offline sale(s) rang after this drawer’s last close and aren’t reconciled.” Each held sale is listed with its order number and total (and a “price divergent” flag if a price or another detail had changed since it was rung — see Price divergent).

A supervisor — anyone with reporting access — sees a Reconcile button on each sale, plus “Reconcile all (N)” to clear the whole list at once. Reconciling a sale acknowledges its cash into the day’s totals.
A cashier without reporting access sees the note but no buttons — it reads “A supervisor must reconcile them.” The cash stays held until a supervisor squares it up.

Once every held sale is reconciled the note reads “All offline sales reconciled.” If a sale can’t be reconciled, it stays in the list with the reason shown so you can try again.

Because a held sale’s cash is set aside like this, it isn’t counted in the Z-report’s Over / short — the cash is in the drawer to be counted while the expected figure doesn’t know about it yet, so the drawer reads over by about the amount of the held sale until somebody reconciles it. It can only go that way: a held sale never makes a drawer read short, so a shortage alongside a pending offline sale is a separate matter. See Over/short only counts reconciled cash.