A lot of new businesses use ShopKeep as their first point of sale. Many are not familiar with the basic cash drawer workflow. This guide will help you understand how to manage your cash drawer.

• Opening Amounts: Every shift needs opening amounts. This is how much money is in the drawer. You actually should count it each shift open and the person responsible for the register should be responsible for the accuracy of the count.
  
  During the shift you will make cash sales which will increase the cash in your drawer. Both cash from sales and from sales tax increase the drawer amount. There are other drawer only transactions though that you can run to keep your drawer count accurate
• Drops: often you will want to take money out of the drawer to put in a drop safe. This is a good safety measure to ensure you don't have too much cash in the drawer. But you don't want to just remove cash without reporting. ShopKeep has a drop function you can use to track money taken out of the drawer. Just login as a manager and click the Drop button to record the cash out.
• Payouts: anytime you use money to pay for a petty cash type purchase use the Payout button. So if you need milk for the coffee bar, maybe lightbulbs or other small need and you pay cash for it you can track that in ShopKeep.
• Inventory Purchase: If you pay cash out of the drawer for stuff you will turn around and sell this is an inventory purchase. Use the Inventory button to track this transaction from the cash drawer
• Closing Amounts: you need to count the drawer at the end of the shift. Whoever is responsible for that shift should be responsible for the over short. That means they should count at the beginning and end of the shift.
• Over/Short: if you did a good job of managing the cash drawer using the above listed methods and you didn't make many mistakes giving change your drawer should be within $5.00 plus or minus. Errors do happen but using these methods will keep your drawer ship shape.