When the count doesn't match

Friday night, the drawer is twelve dollars light, and everyone wants to go home. RewireBox does not stand between them and the door.

The close is never refused

Enter the count, press Close session, and the shift closes. A drawer that's out by twelve dollars closes exactly like one that balances.

This is a decision, not a gap. A till that refuses to close until it balances teaches the whole team one habit within a fortnight: adjust the count until the screen is satisfied. You end up with a system that always balances and a record nobody believes. Taking the honest number and marking it is worth more than a tidy number that isn't true.

So the difference is written onto the session as a signed figure — short when there's less than expected, over when there's more — and the session locks.

What a flag actually asks for

If the difference is more than your allowed difference either way, the session is marked as needing approval, and it says so in red on the record. That figure starts at $5.00 and is yours to set, in Settings → Cash drawer — a busy salon taking a lot of cash may want more room, and a quiet one may want none at all. Set it to $0.00 and every difference of any size asks for a signature.

Approving isn't a correction. Nothing about the money moves. It records that a named person read the discrepancy and accepted it — a signature, dated, on the session.

Only owners and managers can sign one off. That's deliberately narrower than who can work the till: front desk can open a drawer, take cash all day and close it, and cannot approve its own shortfall. Somebody other than the person who counted has to look. If you don't hold that permission the panel still tells you what's outstanding — there's just no button on it, rather than a button that fails when you press it.

The decision is a snapshot taken at close. Change the threshold later and old sessions keep whatever they were marked as, so a record from March doesn't change meaning because of a setting changed in June.

Where the waiting ones live

A flag raised on Saturday night is no use to anybody if it takes until the next audit to find it. Cash drawer → Variance review is the list of every close still needing a signature, and the Cash drawer page carries the count beside it, so the manager who opens the app on Monday meets it without going to look.

Each row is the whole question in one line: when the till closed, which till and which location, the name of the person who counted it, and how far out it came. That last pairing is the point of the control — a signature means little if you can't see whose count you're signing.

From there you can open the session, where the ledger and Explain this variance are, or sign it off in place if you already know what happened. Do that and the row leaves the list.

Help finding it

Explain this variance does the hunting that a person would otherwise do by scrolling.

RewireBox first ranks the session's cash movements by how closely each amount matches the difference — that part is plain arithmetic, not a guess — and then writes a sentence or two about what it found. The candidates are listed underneath with their times and amounts, so you can read past the summary straight to the events.

It is honest about the common case. A twelve-dollar shortfall usually doesn't match any single movement, and when nothing lines up it says so and suggests a recount rather than inventing a culprit. Useful answers here look like "the closest match is a $12.50 refund at 4

" — and when there is no such answer, saying so is the useful answer.

It runs only when you ask, so it costs nothing on a night when the drawer balanced.

Reading the pattern

One short drawer is a bad evening. The same drawer short every Friday is something else, and the thing that turns one into the other is that every session keeps its own honest number.

Both figures are on the record permanently: what the till expected and what was counted. Nobody has to remember, and nobody has to be accused of anything on the night — the sign-off is a note, and the pattern speaks for itself in a month.