Daily cash settlement — finding out why the drawer doesn't add up

Fewer shops than you'd think open the drawer at the end of the day and find it matches exactly. Usually it's something small — a few dollars taken out for supplies and never logged, or change added in without a note. The small stuff is easy to miss unless you've already worked out what the drawer should have in it.

Expected cash vs. actual count

The core of daily settlement is simple: work out how much cash should be in the drawer today (expected cash), then compare it against what you actually count.

Expected cash = opening float + today's total cash sales + petty cash pay-ins − petty cash pay-outs

It's easy to leave the petty cash movements out of that equation. An owner grabbing a few dollars from the drawer for supplies, or topping it up with change from elsewhere, happens all the time in a real shop — but without logging it separately, you're left tracing back "why doesn't this add up?" from scratch at close.

How other platforms handle this

Looking at competitor documentation, the platforms with a clearly defined close-out workflow that reconciles an expected amount against an actual count are Phorest and Mangomint. Phorest's "Cash Up" feature walks you through comparing expected cash to your actual count at end of day (Phorest, "How do I cash up at the end of each day?"), and Mangomint offers "Add a New Count" to log Expected vs. Actual (Mangomint, "Add a New Count (Expected vs Actual)").

Fresha, by contrast, leans more on report-based reconciliation without a dedicated close-out workflow — even a salon interview featured on Fresha's own blog describes checking a sales report at the end of the day rather than using a built-in "expected vs. actual" feature like Phorest or Mangomint's.

💡Note

These citations reflect each platform's official support documentation as we reviewed it — support docs change over time. Confirm current details directly with the platform before making a decision based on this.

How Biseo's daily settlement works

Biseo follows the same approach — expected cash is calculated automatically, and entering your actual count shows the difference right away.

Recording the payment method (cash, card, etc.) when you complete a booking rolls up automatically into the day's total cash sales.
Petty cash movements — supply purchases, topping up change — feed straight into the expected cash calculation as you log them.
At close-out, entering your actual count shows the difference against the expected amount immediately, and you can split the amount banked from the float carried over to the next day.

Once a date is closed, there's no way to reopen or edit it — it's treated as a final accounting record. If a payment method was recorded incorrectly, it's fixed with a correction entry rather than editing the original.

Want to see the daily settlement workflow in action? You can check it out yourself with Start free.