The end of the day

Shifts and the business day they belong to, the drawer, the Z report, and the day’s takings emailed when the day ends.

How do I close a shift and count the drawer?

Open a shift with the float you put in, and close it by counting what is there. Staff count blind: CoinOp does not show what it expects, because knowing the figure turns counting into matching. The difference between counted and expected is the number worth looking at.

The business day

A venue that closes at 2am does not think of a 1am sale as tomorrow’s, and neither does CoinOp. Set the hour your day starts in Settings → Venue and every report, every figure and every rate schedule uses it.

Shifts

Closing as a member of staff. The takings are not shown — knowing the answer turns counting into matching — and the figures appear once the count is in.

The shift screen as an owner sees it, with the takings and the expected cash in the drawer — The same screen for an owner. A shift is opened with a float and closed with a count, and between the two it collects everything that member of staff took and every movement in and out of the drawer.

Counting blind

Whoever counts the drawer is not shown what CoinOp expects to be in it. Knowing the figure turns counting into matching, and a short drawer can be made to balance by adjusting the count instead of reporting it.

The line is drawn at who reconciles rather than at a job title: anybody who can close somebody else's drawer sees the figures, because they are the one checking. Staffcount blind; managers and owners do not. The server withholds the numbers as well as the screen hiding them — they were still on the wire otherwise, one browser console away from whoever wanted them.

Open with the float you put in the drawer.
Work the night. Cash sales, drawer openings and payouts are all recorded against the shift.
Close by counting the drawer. CoinOp shows what it expected, what you counted and the difference — and the difference is the number worth looking at, not the total.

Staff can close their own shift. Closing somebody else’s takes a manager, which is what stops a drawer being “tidied up” by whoever is left at the end.

A shift belongs to one business day, and every report agrees on which. A shift opened at eight in the evening and closed at three in the morning is the evening’s, not two half-days either side of midnight — and if the takings on it plainly happened on the following day, it counts there instead. It is the same answer on the Stats screen, in the Z report and in the email below, so two screens never disagree about which night a shift was.

The day’s figures

The stats screen: takings for the day broken down by how it was paid and what it was for — Stats is today at a glance: what was taken, how it was paid, and what it was for — time, food, drink, passes, shop.

The Z report is the version to keep: totals by tender, VAT collected, discounts given, voids, refunds and the drawer. It is what you hand your accountant, and it is built from the same receipts the customers were given rather than from a second set of numbers.

Owners see the venue’s whole history.
Managers see today and yesterday — enough to run a shift and answer a customer holding a receipt from last night.
Staff see their own shift.

The day’s takings, emailed

Settings → Email

An owner who is not in the building can have the day sent to them. CoinOp emails the report once, when the business day ends — not at midnight — so a night that runs to four in the morning is counted in the night it belongs to.

The mail account is the venue’s own. Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho fill in the server and port for you; anything else is three fields. Nothing goes through us.
Send it to takes several addresses separated by commas — the owner and the accountant, say.
Attach a spreadsheet if the figures are going somewhere other than a phone screen.

Gmail and Microsoft 365 refuse an ordinary account password here. Make an app password in the account’s security settings and use that. CoinOp keeps it write-only: it is sent when you set it and never shown again.

There is a Send a test button and a Send yesterday’s now button, so the setup is proved at the counter rather than at eight the next morning. If a report fails to send, the reason stays on the screen — a report that quietly stopped arriving is noticed weeks later, and by then nobody remembers what changed. A till that was asleep when the day ended sends the report when it wakes.

Getting the numbers out

The reports export as CSV, which opens in Excel or Numbers and goes straight to an accountant. Receipts can be looked up and reprinted individually at any time; nothing is summarised into a total that cannot be taken apart again.

Everything here is read out of the venue’s own database on the venue’s own machine. It goes nowhere except where you send it — the daily email, through your own mail account, to your own addresses. See Licence, updates and backups for what leaves the building on its own, which is four fields and no money.