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Shifts and cash drawers

Two things are tracked separately during service, and understanding the difference saves a lot of confusion at the end of the night: a shift is a period someone worked. A drawer is a box of money.

They are related — a shift usually holds a drawer — but they close separately, and a shift can exist without one.

A shift

A shift runs from when someone clocks in to when their working period is closed and accounted for. On the Shift & Cash Control screen a shift is Open, Running, Handover, Clocked out, Counted — pending review, Reconciled or Closed, and a shift ended by force is also marked Force-closed.

A shift ends when its person clocks out and a manager closes it. A shift with no drawer is closed with Approve clock-out; a shift holding a drawer is closed with Close & count, which counts the drawer. Force-close is for a shift someone abandoned, not the normal end. The steps are in Clock in and clock out.

A drawer

A drawer is money someone is responsible for. You open one by giving it a number, a name and an opening float — the cash it starts with — and it is assigned to a holder, so at any moment one named person is accountable for it.

A drawer's state is shown on its row. The states it can carry are Open, Handover, Counting, Declared — pending review, Disputed, Reconciled and Closed. Counted — pending review is one of the shift row's labels, not a drawer state.

Declaring, and why someone else reviews it

At the end of a drawer's life the person holding it counts what is actually there and declares it. Cash, card, online or UPI, and anything on account are declared separately rather than as one lump, so the declaration says what kind of money it was as well as how much.

Declaring and accepting are two different steps. Closing and counting a drawer is one action; accepting the declared figure, or asking for a recount, is another. They are separate controls on the row, so a declared figure is reviewed rather than simply filed.

What can be done to a drawer

Depending on its state, a drawer's row offers: assign a holder, hand it over to someone else, close and count it, accept a declaration, ask for a recount, or force-close it.

Handover and closing are separate actions, which is what lets one person's shift end mid-service while the same drawer carries on with someone else.

Why this matters at the end of the day

Open shifts and undeclared drawers are the two things that most often stop a day being closed. The day-close checklist asks whether every shift is closed and reconciled and whether drawer counts have been declared, so anything left hanging here surfaces there. See Close the day.