Accounting

Balancing your tills is essential to any retail business. It actually should be part of your daily routine, but now suddenly you sense that something is not right and you want to balance the till. This is where we use X-offs,

What we strongly suggest is that every cashier has their cash drawer. There is no problem as our system allows many tills to work on one computer,

At the start of each shift, the staff member gets the float. This can be easily balanced at any time.

Go to the End of Day section in the cash register and select X-offs

With this summary of sales what will get extra information which may help with your investigations such is the net sales, voids, paid ins/outs, taxes, the breakdown of various methods of payment and more.

Select on the end of day page choose the X-off option that is below the EOD option marked in green. Select the time the staff member assigned to the register started and the current time. You now run the report.

Now it’s time to count your cash.

When balancing lookout for overages and shortages, an overage is not to be ignored as it can mean that people are not recording all their sales. If so, why are they not recording all the transactions?

One point that can in retail save you time is automation that saves you time.

Consider that you save a lot of time of manual bookkeeping every year by integrating your POS system into your accounting system.

Our software has inbuilt a powerful GST auditing tool inbuilt which gives you a fast and accurate audit of your GST.

Now what sometimes happens is that people have some queries about their GST and they want to check in their accounting programs that it is giving the same result as their point of sale software.

This will give you a detailed report which including this.

Now, this you can check with your accounting program.

If the two are not the same, then what you need to do is track down the incorrect figure. This can be extremely difficult as sometimes, it is not actually wrong in either system. So we need to audit.

The problem here is that three (3) is often a big job to audit in practice. So what we do is try to break it down to a short period, generally a day and audit just that day. This process can take time.

So what we suggest is to run this report for one month, then the accounting program for the same month. If the problem is not noticeable in that month, we go to the next month and run both again. It does not take long in our system as its Microsoft SQL which sets the standard for speed.

If it is noticeable, then we look at the first half of the month and check that with the accounting program and so keep going making the period smaller and smaller until we get to a day where the problem is noticeable. Then I check the transactions on that day.

It will take you using this method about seven (7) attempts to get to that day. Once you get into the rhythm, it is relatively quick.

Sometimes though it can be tough to find, I remember once, I could not figure it out why a $2000 transaction was not there. It turned out that it was an insurance claim that had wrongly been put down in the accounting software as a sale. Doing this check, as a result, saved the retailer $200. 

Our software has inbuilt a powerful GST auditing tool inbuilt which gives you a fast and accurate audit of your GST.

Now what sometimes happens is that people have some queries about their GST and they want to check in their accounting programs that it is giving the same result as their point of sale software.

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This will give you a detailed report which including this.

​

Now, this you can check with your accounting program.

If the two are not the same, then what you need to do is track down the incorrect figure. This can be extremely difficult as sometimes, it is not actually wrong in either system. So we need to audit.

The problem here is that three (3) is often a big job to audit in practice. So what we do is try to break it down to a short period, generally a day and audit just that day. This process can take time.

So what we suggest is to run this report for one month, then the accounting program for the same month. If the problem is not noticeable in that month, we go to the next month and run both again. It does not take long in our system as its Microsoft SQL which sets the standard for speed.

If it is noticeable, then we look at the first half of the month and check that with the accounting program and so keep going making the period smaller and smaller until we get to a day where the problem is noticeable. Then I check the transactions on that day.

It will take you using this method about seven (7) attempts to get to that day. Once you get into the rhythm, it is relatively quick.

Sometimes though it can be tough to find, I remember once, I could not figure it out why a $2000 transaction was not there. It turned out that it was an insurance claim that had wrongly been put down in the accounting software as a sale. Doing this check, as a result, saved the retailer $200. 

There were problems this morning with MYOB, with people trying to log in, when we tested it then there was a problem however according to MYOB the problems have been fixed.

Also, I have tested it now and it seems all fine.

Every year we survey our clients to see what they think of our performance

While we do this, we ask a few questions about what our clients are doing and what they want to do with the software.  So we asked them about what accounting systems they use? 

The first point to notice is that about 95% of retailers here are running some accounting program, which is effectively everyone. Interestingly although there are many accounting software packages, most retailers in our market space use one of four systems.

In my experience, as Australian standards in accounting software has not changed much in 30 years, all these programs can do the same job. All are good, and the difference tends to be, I think user preference, requirements and ease of use.

Running through them in turn.

MYOB historically and now is by the far the most popular system by retailers. Recently as they introduced their cloud version, you can see its popularity has continued to grow in our chart. I find it too rigid in use for my taste but many would consider this a positive advantage. 

Quickbooks and Reckon, a few years ago had a terrific deal going, over half price so we told our clients and many of my clients jumped on this deal, obviously, Quickbooks has lost much market share as the deal died out but as their cloud version comes out they are slowly building up their market share. This one is my personal favourite but I do accept that this flexibility comes at a price that a user does require more training than other software packages.   

Cashflow manager is an extremely solid and popular accounting program, I am not surprised there is a growing interest in the product. Its simplicity is I am sure part of its appeal.

Xero is expensive but very good. Now it is clearly facing pressure from other vendors now that can now do cloud as well so my clients are moving away from it. 

Finally, interest in what is many other smaller accounting software packages are dropping off. I think that this might be the effect of the growing interest in cloud computing. The other problem is that if you adopt a system with few users, it can be hard to get help if you require help.