Open and close a shift

The salon opens at nine and there's two hundred dollars of change in the till. Telling RewireBox that is the first thing anyone does, and it takes about ten seconds.

Apps → Cash drawer, then Open a session.

Starting the shift

A session is one shift's run of one till. It starts with an opening float — the cash already in the drawer — and that number becomes the starting expected balance: what RewireBox believes is in there.

From then on the card at the top shows Expected in drawer, and it moves on its own as the day goes: cash sales push it up, refunds pull it down. You don't record those. What you do record is everything that isn't a sale.

• Pay in — money going into the till that didn't come from a client. Change from the safe, a float top-up.
• Pay out — money coming out. A supply run, change for the coffee shop. You can't pay out more than the drawer holds; ask for more and it refuses rather than letting the till go imaginary.
• New count — a spot check. More on that below.
• Print — a one-page slip with the float, the expected total and the times, if someone keeps paper with the banking.

Give every pay-in and pay-out a description. It costs three seconds and it is the entire reason anyone can explain a difference at the end of the week.

Counting without changing anything

New count asks you to count the bills and coins and tells you how that compares to expected. Then it does something worth understanding: nothing.

A count is recorded as its own line in the ledger — what you counted, what was expected, and the difference — and the running total carries on exactly as it was. The screen says so as soon as you save one: the count is logged — it doesn't change the expected balance.

That's on purpose. A count that quietly re-baselined the drawer would erase the discrepancy it just found, and a till that always balances tells you nothing. Count at lunchtime, count at a shift change, count whenever the drawer feels wrong — each one is a separate observation, and none of them moves the goalposts.

Closing it down

Close session is the count that counts.

You count into a grid of bills and coins rather than typing one total, because that's how anyone actually counts a till — stack by stack. Each row shows its own subtotal as you go, and Other takes anything you'd rather not itemise.

Underneath, three numbers: Expected, Actual, and the Difference between them. If they don't match you'll see by exactly how much before you commit to anything.

Press Close session and the shift ends. RewireBox writes the variance onto the session and locks it — a closed session can't be edited or reopened by anyone, which is precisely what makes it worth anything as a record. You land on that record, and it's read-only from the moment it exists.

Where it goes

Nothing here is pass/fail. A drawer that's out by three dollars closes exactly like one that balances, and the difference is recorded rather than argued about. What happens next depends on how far out it was — see When the count doesn't match.