Shop ka hisab kaise kare: the short version
Close the day in five steps. Count the cash in the drawer and subtract your opening float. Add up the day's sales, split into cash and udhaar. Add up the udhaar payments customers made today. Work out what cash should be there: opening float plus cash sales plus udhaar recovered, minus anything paid out of the drawer. Then compare that expected figure with what you counted. The difference is the number that matters, and if it isn't zero you find out tonight, while everyone who worked the counter is still there.
Below is each step in detail, and the mistakes that stop the numbers from matching.
Step 1: Count the cash, and count the float separately
Count the money once and note the number. Then subtract the opening float, the change you started the day with. The float was never today's takings, and mixing it in is the most common reason a cash-up looks fine on a bad day.
Keep the float at the same amount every morning. If it changes, you compare against a different starting point every night and you'll never spot a small, regular shortfall.
Step 2: Split the day's sales into cash and udhaar
People skip this step, and everything after it depends on it. Total sales for the day are not the same as cash taken. A day with a lot of credit looks terrible in the drawer and normal in the books, and unless you separate them you can't tell which kind of day you had.
- Cash sales: money that actually came into the drawer today.
- Udhaar given today: goods that left today with no money paid. This is a sale the customer still owes you for, not a loss.
- Card, wallet or bank transfer, if you take them: real sales, but not cash, so keep them out of the drawer sums.
Step 3: Add up the udhaar recovered today
When customers pay off old balances, that cash has nothing to do with today's sales. If you don't record recoveries separately, the money makes a slow day look busy and hides that today's selling was down.
Note two numbers each evening: udhaar given today and udhaar recovered today. Compare them over a couple of weeks and you'll see whether your credit book is growing or shrinking. Most shopkeepers have a feeling about this but no proof.
Step 4: Work out what should be in the drawer
The expected cash is simple arithmetic: opening float, plus cash sales, plus udhaar recovered, minus anything paid out of the drawer during the day (a supplier paid in cash, petrol, the boy sent for lunch). Those payouts are the second big reason a drawer comes up short when nothing is wrong. They stay on record only if someone writes a slip and puts it in the drawer when the cash leaves.
- 1Opening float (fixed every morning)
- 2+ cash sales today
- 3+ udhaar recovered today
- 4− cash paid out today (supplier, expenses, personal withdrawals)
- 5= what the drawer should hold
Step 5: Compare, and deal with the difference tonight
Counted cash minus expected cash is your variance. A small difference on a busy day is usually wrong change and not worth chasing. Watch the pattern instead. A small variance that always goes the same way is not random. Something is causing it.
The one number to write down every night
The difference between expected cash and counted cash. A shop that records this one figure every day will spot a steady leak within two weeks. A shop that only counts the drawer won't spot it at all, because the drawer is different every day anyway.
Why doesn't the hisab tally? The four usual reasons
When the numbers won't agree, it's almost always one of these:
- The float got mixed into the takings, so every day's total is too high by the same amount and nobody notices.
- Cash left the drawer for a supplier or an errand and nobody wrote a slip. This is the biggest single cause, and it isn't theft.
- An udhaar sale was counted as a cash sale, so the drawer is short by exactly the value of the goods that went out on credit.
- A recovery was recorded twice, once as a payment and once as a cash sale, so the drawer looks fine but the customer's balance is wrong.
Should you do it on paper or at the till?
All five steps work on paper, and for a small shop a notebook with five lines a night is enough. But on paper you still add up columns at the end of a long day, which is when sums go wrong, and you can't see a pattern across a month without reading thirty pages again.
Software helps in one specific way: if every sale is recorded with its payment type as it happens, the totals from steps 2 and 3 are ready at closing time. NexusTill's daily cash-up (the Z-report) is on every plan, including Starter. It gives you the day's totals (gross, discount, tax collected, refunded) and what should be in the drawer, so the only manual step left is counting the money and comparing. Cash taken out during the day is still yours to track on a slip. The report shows what should be there before those payouts, which is the number you need to spot them.
It doesn't stop cash walking out. It shows you the same number every night until a pattern is obvious, which is hard for a tired person doing sums at 10pm.
A daily routine you can hand to someone else
- 1Same float every morning, counted and noted before the first sale.
- 2Record every sale with how it was paid (cash, udhaar, card) when it happens, not later.
- 3Every rupee taken out of the drawer gets a slip in the drawer when it leaves.
- 4At closing: count the cash, note expected and counted, and write the difference in one place.
- 5Once a week, look at those seven differences together. That's your real hisab.
Counting the drawer tells you what you have. Knowing what should be in it tells you whether something is wrong, and that second part is the hisab.
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Written by The NexusTill team.