Banking the Day's Takings

The money physically leaves the building. Somebody carries it to a bank, and between the drawer and the bank statement there is a gap that BigLedger records in exactly one document and does not police at all. By the end of this guide you will know which document that is, what the ledger says while the cash is in transit, and who notices when a deposit never arrives. Budget fifteen minutes to set the pattern up once and two minutes a day after that.

This guide is for whoever banks the cash — a branch manager, a supervisor or an accounts clerk. If you are on the counter and you have just counted a drawer, start with Balancing the Drawer instead.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd runs 22 branches. At GS-KV-01 yesterday’s cash takings were RM 3,547.55. RM 2,000 of it was handed to the branch manager at four o’clock and banked the same afternoon; the drawer closed on RM 1,847.55, RM 300 of which stays as this morning’s float. So RM 1,547.55 is this morning’s deposit, and it is the second Bank In for the same trading day — which is normal and is exactly why the deposit carries the bank’s own reference rather than a day’s takings figure. In the chart of accounts the branch’s cash is CASH-PRI-KV01 and the bank account it feeds is the group’s primary current account.

The four numbers, and why no two of them are the same thing

Every argument about banked cash is two of these being compared as though they were one.

The number	What it actually is
The drawer	Physical notes. Float plus cash takings, less anything taken out. Lives in the session’s opening, closing and float movements, and posts nothing — no journal, no cashbook line, no document
The till’s cash account (`CASH-PRI-KV01`)	One cashbook line per cash settlement line on a finalised bill. No float, no change, no drop. It is “cash sold”, not “cash in the shop”
The bank account in BigLedger	What you have told BigLedger you deposited — nothing more
The bank statement	What the bank agrees it received, on the day it says it received it

Read that table twice, because it explains the question that brings most people here: why does my cash account not equal my drawer? It never will. The drawer contains a float the ledger has never seen, and the ledger contains takings the drawer no longer holds because you banked them. The two are reconciled by the deposit, and the deposit is a document you have to raise.

Step 1: Record the cash leaving the drawer, at the counter

POS General › Cash In / Cash Out › CASH OUT

Before the money leaves the till, the cashier records it going: CASH OUT, the amount, and a remark naming who took it. This is the drawer’s own record, it is what makes the closing count work out, and it is the only thing that ties a named person to the moment the cash changed hands.

It is also, deliberately, not an accounting entry. A cash-out moves nothing in the ledger, because nothing has happened yet in accounting terms — the money is still the company’s and still in the branch. The accounting entry is Step 2, and it is somebody else’s job.

The cash-out line never appears on the Z Report. The till writes it against the session and not against the drawer, and the report’s float block joins on the drawer reference. So the branch’s own record of the hand-over is the cashier’s slip, signed by both people — not a screen. See Balancing the Drawer, Step 2.

Step 2: Raise the deposit as a Bank In cash transfer

Cashbook › Cash Transfer › Create

This is the document. A Cash Transfer moves money between two cashbooks, and a deposit is exactly that: out of the branch’s cash account and into the bank’s.

On the transfer	What to put
Transfer Type	Bank In
Company and Branch	The company that owns the cash, and `GS-KV-01`
Transaction Date	The date the cash left the branch, not the date you keyed it
Reference No	The bank’s deposit slip or machine reference — this is what the reconciliation will match on
Line 1 — Transfer From Cashbook	`CASH-PRI-KV01`, RM 1,547.55 (stored as a negative)
Line 2 — Transfer To Cashbook	The bank current account, RM 1,547.55
Line 3 — Transfer Charges	Only if the bank or the cash-in-transit contractor takes a fee

Then press FINAL. That queues three things: the journal, the cashbook lines on both sides, and the post-dated-cheque queue (empty here). Cr the branch cash account, Dr the bank account, on the transfer’s own date.

Put the date the cash left, not today. Everything downstream keys off it: the cashbook line copies the header’s transaction date, the journal takes the same one, and the bank reconciliation for that month looks for it there. A deposit keyed three days late with today’s date is a deposit the bank statement will not match.

If FINAL fails with MISSING_CASHBOOK: STL_MTHD or MISSING_GL_CODE: STL_MTHD, one of the two settlement items on the transfer has no cashbook behind it, or its cashbook has no GL code. That is a configuration fix in Cashbook and Chart of Account, not a re-key of the transfer.

Step 3: Decide whether the cash in transit should be visible, and pay for it either way

Between the cashier handing the money over and the Bank In being finalised, BigLedger shows the cash as still in the branch’s cash account. There is no cash-in-transit document, no in-transit status on a transfer, and nothing that ages a deposit that has not arrived.

You have two defensible ways to run this, and it is worth choosing rather than drifting:

Raise the Bank In on the day the cash leaves. The ledger is right about the day and briefly optimistic about the location. Cheapest, and what most branches do. The exposure is a deposit that is finalised and never actually banked — and the only thing that catches it is Step 4.

Or give cash in transit its own cashbook. A cashbook is an account with a GL code behind it, so you can make one — CASH-TRANSIT-KV01 — and bank in two hops: drawer account → transit account when the cash leaves, transit account → bank when the statement confirms it. The transit account’s balance is then, by construction, money that has left a branch and not reached a bank, and a non-zero balance older than a day is a question. It costs one extra document per deposit and one extra account per branch.

What neither of them gives you is an alert. Nothing in BigLedger notices a transit balance that has sat for a week, and nothing reports on it unasked. Whichever shape you choose, somebody looks at Cashbook › Enquiries › Cash Level for the cash accounts once a week, and that person is named at the branch or it does not happen.

Step 4: Match the deposit against the bank statement

Bank Reconciliation

The Bank In is a claim. The statement line is the fact. Matching them is what turns “we banked it” into “the bank has it”, and it is the only check in this whole chain that an outsider performs for you.

Two things to expect while you do it.

The cash side matches to the sen; the card side will not. A cash bill settled by card writes its cashbook line net of the settlement method’s charges — the acquirer’s fee is taken out at the journal, not at the counter, and posted separately to the company’s SETTLEMENT_CHARGES account. So a card day of RM 4,000 through a method charging 1.8% is RM 3,928 in the cashbook, and RM 3,928 is what the acquirer’s statement will show. The till was never wrong; the two figures answer different questions. The full arithmetic is on the POS applet page.

Card money also arrives on a different day — the acquirer settles on its own cycle, so the card cashbook is reconciled against the acquirer’s statement on the acquirer’s dates, and the cash cashbook against the bank’s. They are two reconciliations, not one, and a branch that takes cash and cards has at least two cashbooks to close every month.

Unreconcile before you correct. Once a transfer’s cashbook lines carry an active reconciliation link, changing the company, the date, the lines or the amount is refused with CASH_DOCUMENT_RECONCILED_TXN_LINES_BLOCK_EDIT. Remarks and reference edits still go through, which is usually all a corrected deposit slip needs.

Who owns which part of this

Three people, three different moments, and the hand-over points are where money goes missing. Separate them where you can — and where you cannot, at least make the hand-over leave paper.

Who	What they do	When	How they know they got it right
The cashier	Counts the drawer, records CASH OUT, hands the cash over and keeps a signed slip	At the hand-over, before the session closes	The closing count works out: float + cash takings − cash out = what is in the drawer
Whoever banks it	Raises the Bank In with the bank’s own reference, dated the day the cash left	Same day	Cashbook › Enquiries › Query Cashbook Transaction on the branch cash account shows the deposit and a balance that has come down by it
Whoever reconciles	Matches the deposit against the bank statement	At the next statement	The statement line and the cashbook line are matched, and nothing is left unmatched on either side

If those three are the same person, say so out loud and compensate somewhere else: the finalise permission on the cash transfer is the control that separation would otherwise have been, and a second person reading Cash Level weekly is cheaper than any of the alternatives.

What BigLedger will not do here

Stated plainly, because each of these is something a reader will otherwise wait for.

It will not tell you a deposit is late. No ageing, no alert, no report of transfers not yet reconciled.
It will not stop you banking cash you never took. A Bank In is a document, not a count; nothing compares it to the drawer.
It will not carry your cash-handling limits. There is no setting anywhere in the till that caps how much cash a drawer may hold, and nothing warns when it is high. If your insurer sets a limit, the control is the branch’s — what BigLedger gives you is the Cash Level enquiry to see the balance, and the cash-out record to prove you acted on it.
It will not reconcile the drawer for you. See Balancing the Drawer; the comparison is a person’s job and the moment is before the cashier goes home.

What success looks like

At the end of a week, for one branch:

Every day has a Bank In, dated the day the cash left, carrying the bank’s own reference.
The branch cash account’s balance in Cash Level is close to a day’s takings, not a week’s — if it is climbing, deposits are not being raised.
Nothing older than the current month is unmatched in Bank Reconciliation on the cash cashbook.
The card cashbook is being reconciled separately, against the acquirer’s statement, and its difference from the till figure equals the charges and not a mystery.

Common mistakes

Dating the deposit the day you keyed it. The statement will not match, and the mismatch is discovered a month later by someone who has to reconstruct which day the cash was actually taken.

Expecting the till’s cash account to equal the drawer. It never does. It holds no float, no change and no drop.

Banking the cash and recording the deposit against the wrong branch. The transfer carries a branch of its own; a deposit posted to the wrong branch leaves one cash account climbing and another going negative, and both look like a theft.

Correcting a reconciled transfer. Unreconcile first, or the save is refused — and if you force the issue by raising a second transfer instead, you have now banked the money twice in the ledger.

Treating the card shortfall as missing money. It is the merchant fee, it is posted to SETTLEMENT_CHARGES, and it is computable to the sen.