Shop ka hisab kaise kare: closing the day's accounts properly

Shop ka hisab kaise kare — the short version

Close a shop's daily accounts in five steps: count the physical 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 to the counted figure. The difference is the only number that matters, and if it's not zero you find out tonight, while everybody who was on the counter is still standing there.

The rest of this post is each step in detail, plus the mistakes that make the numbers refuse to agree.

Step 1: Count the cash, and count the float separately

Start with the physical money. Count it once, note the number, then subtract the opening float — the change you started the day with. That float was never today's takings, and folding it in is the single most common reason a cash-up looks fine on a bad day.

Set your float at a fixed amount and keep it fixed — the same starting change every morning. A float that moves around means you're comparing against a different baseline every night and can never spot a small, regular shortfall.

Step 2: Split the day's sales into cash and udhaar

This is the step people skip, and it's the one that makes everything else work. Total sales for the day is not the same as cash taken. A day with heavy credit looks like a terrible day in the drawer and a normal day in the books, and unless you separate them you'll never know which you had.

• Cash sales — money that actually entered the drawer today.
• Udhaar given today — goods that left today with no money attached. This is a sale and a receivable, not a loss.
• Card, wallet or bank transfer, if you take them — real sales, but not cash in the drawer, so keep them out of the drawer maths.

Written down, that's three lines. Held in your head, it's a guess.

Step 3: Add up the udhaar recovered today

Customers paying off old balances put cash in the drawer that has nothing to do with today's sales. If you don't record recoveries separately, that money makes a slow day look busy and hides the fact that today's actual selling was down.

Two numbers to note each evening: udhaar given today, and udhaar recovered today. The gap between them, tracked over a couple of weeks, tells you whether your credit book is growing or shrinking — which is a thing most shopkeepers feel but can't prove.

Step 4: Work out what should be in the drawer

The expected cash is arithmetic, not judgement. Opening float, plus cash sales, plus udhaar recovered, minus anything paid out of the drawer during the day — a supplier delivery paid in cash, petrol, the boy sent for lunch. Those payouts are the second big reason a drawer comes up short when nothing is actually wrong, and they only stay accounted for if somebody writes a slip and puts it in the drawer at the moment the cash leaves.

1. 1Opening float (fixed every morning)
2. 2+ cash sales today
3. 3+ udhaar recovered today
4. 4− cash paid out today (supplier, expenses, personal withdrawals)
5. 5= what the drawer should hold

Step 5: Compare, and act on the difference tonight

Counted cash minus expected cash is your variance. A small over or under on a busy day is usually change given wrong and isn't worth chasing. What matters is the pattern: a variance that's small but always in the same direction is not randomness, it's something systematic — and you'll only see it if you write the number down every night.

Why the hisab refuses to tally: the usual four

When the numbers won't agree, it's almost always one of these before it's anything dramatic:

• The float got mixed into the takings, so every day's total is inflated 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 is not theft.
• An udhaar sale got counted as a cash sale, so the drawer is short by exactly the amount of goods that went out on credit.
• A recovery got recorded twice — once as a payment and once as a cash sale — so the drawer looks fine and the customer's balance is wrong.

Doing this on paper vs doing it at the till

All five steps work on paper, and for a small shop a notebook with five lines a night is genuinely enough. What paper can't do is remove the adding-up — you're totalling columns at the end of a long day, which is exactly when arithmetic goes wrong, and you can't see a pattern across a month without re-reading thirty pages.

Software's contribution here is narrow but real: if every sale is recorded as it happens with its payment type, the four totals in step 2 and 3 already exist by closing time. NexusTill's daily cash-up (the Z-report) is on every plan including Starter, and 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 physical money and comparing it to that figure. Cash taken out of the drawer during the day is still yours to track on a slip; the report tells you what should be there before those payouts, which is exactly the number you need to spot them.

That's the honest scope of what it does. It doesn't stop cash walking out. It shows you the same number every night until the pattern is obvious, which is the part a person doing sums at 10pm reliably can't.

A routine you can hand to somebody else

1. 1Same float every morning, counted and noted before the first sale.
2. 2Every sale gets recorded with how it was paid — cash, udhaar, card — as it happens, not later.
3. 3Every rupee out of the drawer gets a slip in the drawer, at the moment it leaves.
4. 4At close: count the cash, note expected vs counted, write the difference in one place.
5. 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 anything is wrong — and only the second one is a hisab.

Written by The NexusTill team.