at Community Cycles, we've had a cash register for a while, but no one ever knew how to use it except to hit the "cash" button, and use it as a glorified cash box. over the course of the 6 months after we bought the thing, several people read through the manual, took it home to play with, and no one could ever figure it out. one week, two people decided to take on the project of figuring it out. they worked on it for about 1 hour each day, and finally figured out how to enter sales, how to specify that some sales were taxed and others not, and most of the workings of the thing, so that we now run all transactions through the register. we even run sales reports at end of day, which zeroes out the drawer. we have yet to have a day where our sales number from the register matches the amount of cash in the drawer, but we're getting closer.  the register we got also allows us to check during the day to see how much cash/check/charge we should have in the drawer. this is helpful for super busy days, or days when there's a lot of people in the office...if we find a lot of cash in the drawer, we'll take it out, just to make sure it doesn't walk away on it's own...



On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Stuart O Anderson <soa@ri.cmu.edu> wrote:
At Free Ride we used a paper log for a long time, but it was never very accurate.  We bought a used cash register, despite some concerns about how difficult it would be to learn to use and maintain.  In retrospect, I think it was a really good decision for us - we do a much better job of tracking our cash flow now, and there's never been much of an issue learning to use it.

Stuart

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