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.

Sign in with your PIN

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 cashier on duty — and their role — is shown in the top bar, so it’s always clear who’s ringing.

Open the till

Before you take any cash, open the till with the cash you’re starting with (the float). The till controls live at the top of the register screen. 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? Park it from the cart and it waits in Held sales at the top of the screen until you come back to it.

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 — pop the cash drawer without a sale (a “no-sale”), for example to give change. It’s recorded so the drawer still reconciles.

Take a return

Press Returns in the top bar 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

• Switch user — hand the register to another employee; they tap in their own PIN.
• Lock — lock the screen when you step away.

Either way, finish or park the current sale first — Swann Retail won’t switch or lock with a cart that still has something to charge, so an open sale can’t get stranded under the wrong person.

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 the price had moved since it was rung).

• 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 — so a drawer that reads over or short by about the amount of a pending offline sale is showing the held sale, not a real cash discrepancy. See Over/short only counts reconciled cash.