The 20-minute close: what to check before you lock up
Closing up is a checklist, not a mood. Five things, in an order that means a mistake is found tonight rather than at the end of the month.
Most discrepancies are not theft. They are a card payment recorded twice, a cash sale nobody rang up, or a discount someone gave verbally. All three are trivial to fix on the day and nearly impossible to reconstruct three weeks later, which is the entire argument for closing properly every night rather than well once a month.
The five checks, in order
- Count the cash drawer against the day’s cash payments. A difference under the price of a coffee is rounding; anything larger is a transaction someone forgot to record.
- Reconcile card takings against the provider’s own total. Two numbers, one screen — if they disagree, the answer is in today’s payments, not in the bank.
- Check tips are assigned to the right person before anyone goes home, because tomorrow nobody will remember.
- Look at tomorrow’s confirmations. Anything still unconfirmed at close is a slot you can still fill from the waitlist tonight.
- One stock number: the item you are most likely to run out of mid-appointment. Not a full count — one number.
The order matters. Cash first because it is the only one that cannot be reconstructed from a system, and confirmations second-to-last because that is the check that can still change tomorrow’s takings.
A close that takes twenty minutes every night is cheaper than a reconciliation that takes an evening every month.