z read for a shop

villapb

I was wondering if a z read for a shop shows for example £300 and the cash shows £296, £4 under how do you show the lost £4, where does sage show it.
Also if it was £4 over again what happens.....................thanks again.

uknitty

You could post the £4 to reconcilliation discrepancies agaist the budget code for the particular shop / till.

villapb

Cheers uknitty, but you lost me..................would sage put into suspense and it could be written off.

uknitty

I reconcile the takings for a community cafe, I don't use Sage though as we have Quickbooks in our office. The book keeping entries I use are

Dr Bank with actual amount recieved
Cr Sales with Z read

And the balancing figure (either Dr or Cr) goes to reconcilliation (cafe). I find that the reconcilliation account tends to balance out over the course of a week. Its handy to keep all the differences sitting in the one account as it means you can keep track of any discrepancies over a period of time and note if there are any patterns.

I don't really know Sage that well, but I think that under the bank tab there is actually a wizard called " cash regsiter" that will automatically post the takings to sales, cash to the bank and any discrepancies to a specified account.

Rinske

Same way in my company, only we got a cash difference account.
So the sales go to the relevant customer and sales accounts and the actual cash received is shown in the bank.

Because we got a few issues in the communications between the shop systems and the accounting system, we often have to fallback on reconciling the cash difference accounts, so it's quite handy to have them separated by shop.

villapb

thanks guy, would it be right or is this too long winded, dr cash account on a daily basis and cash difference account, then cr cash account and debit the bank account when the cash was physically paid into the bank with a pay in book, and how much was paid in.

Rinske

Ah right, we removed that step, as it got too time consuming. So now we work on a daily base, we got 37 stores spread out over the world, with a few new ones coming up soon and we process it debit bank and credit sales on a daily base each for the total amount per store in cash or credit card separated, with the cash differences account for the differences.

Then on the bank recs we have all sales separated between cash sales and credit card sales (split between different cards if needed), so when we do a bank rec and see the cash coming in the bank, we match them up to the amount of the cash sales on the related day and the same for the credit card receipts. At that point we can then pick up any inconsistencies again, posting them to the cash differences account.

It means we got a double check up, first we compare the system with the till and later we compare the system with the bank. Rather than getting our information from the Z readings, the shops put them in excel and email them to us, and quite often when there is an error, we put the difference in on the first comparison and then later correct it when we get to the bank rec, but that's just how it is.

Not sure if that answers your question though.

villapb

Hi rinske, so you put credit card as dr bank too, i had set up a credit/debit card account too and was transfering to bank. Its one shop but your way makes sense.............i have am excel sheet for counting the cash, cheques and cards ............which the z read is attached too.
You have helped me beacause ive seen so many ways of doing it, even using write off in sage.

villapb

ps just thought because its a one man band shop, they tended to use the cash taking to buy petty cash things and write it on the paying in book and paid wages in cash too, but i told them to set up a petty cash tin, just sharing what the small guys tend to do. They said they where fed up with the bank charges on just paying in cash to thier bank lol.

Rinske

We have petty cash takings in our shops as well, but treated differently in different countries unfortunately.

In the UK and EU it's simply registered on a daily base by deducting it from the cash sales (they have to fill this in on the same sheet) and they send all till receipts with the petty cash receipts on a weekly base to us. In the other countries they got a separate tin like you say, or they treat it as expenses for the manager and reimburse them via payroll. (Especially if the shop doesn't accept cash or hardly receives any cash sales at all.)

We don't pay wages in cash, but then it's just to big and widespread for that. Plus we expect the shops to do the banking daily/ weekly, but basically pay it in per day or email us the breakdown of what days the banked money covers (not all shops manage to do this, but usually it's easy to track and find back). I know it seems very stringent in some respects, but it really helps to keep track of errors and mistakes and by expecting them to basically count the money on a daily base, you do keep the mistakes to a minimum, as they might remember the customer and contact the customer to correct the mistakes.

Our credit card receipts are treated the same way as cash. We don't have a separate credit card account, but just a different bank transaction code to define the difference between the two. However we don't have sage and I've never used it, so I can't judge if that would work for you. As the money is transferred in our bank on a daily base with a few days delay at most, this was the easiest way to keep track and it made matching it easier on the bank recs.

The only thing I will say is that for the countries with multiple shops, we have a dummy bank account set up per shop which is linked to the bank account where we receive the money (so the balance is on the main account, but the transactions shown as a separate bank account for the bank recs) just to find the correct shop back easier. This is mainly done because the automatic bankrecs haven't worked at all since we started using this software, so they are done manual anyways.