The close is where the night becomes a number. Done properly it takes twenty minutes; done carelessly it takes a fortnight to unpick.
The close, in order
- Find the open checks. Anything still open is either a guest who walked, a tab nobody closed, or a partial payment. Resolve each one deliberately — do not let the system close them for you and inherit the guesswork.
- Have staff declare tips and clock out. Declarations made the next morning are estimates, and estimates are what audits are made of.
- Settle the card batch. Until the batch settles with the processor, the day’s card sales are authorised but not paid. Most systems settle automatically at a set time; know when yours does and confirm it happened.
- Count the drawer. Compare the physical count against expected cash. Record the variance even when it is zero — a variance log with gaps tells you nothing.
- Read the day before you leave. Five minutes with the sales summary while the shift is fresh beats an hour reconstructing it on Monday.
Reports worth reading, and what they tell you
Sales summary
Net sales, covers, average check. The daily pulse. Watch average check rather than gross — gross moves with how busy you were, average check moves with how well you sold.
Item sales
What actually sold, by quantity and by revenue. Sorted ascending it is a menu-pruning tool; sorted descending it tells you what must never be 86’d.
Voids, comps and discounts
The report that repays the most attention. Read it by employee and by reason code. You are looking for patterns, not incidents: the same person, the same reason, the same time of night. One comp is hospitality. A shape in the data is something else.
Labour
Hours and cost against sales for the same period. Labour as a percentage of sales, read by day-part, is what tells you the Tuesday lunch schedule is wrong.
Payments and deposits
Recorded sales against what the processor actually paid. Reconcile weekly. Deposits usually lag by a day or two, and the gap is normal — an unexplained difference after the lag is not.
Tips, service charges and gratuity are not interchangeable. They are taxed differently, distributed differently, and reported differently. Confirm how each is configured with your accountant before your first payroll run, not after.
When the numbers do not agree
Work outward from the smallest unit. A discrepancy is almost always one of these, in roughly this order of likelihood: an open check nobody settled, a tip entered on the slip but never into the system, a cash payment recorded as card, a void that should have been a comp, or a batch that failed to settle. Check them in that order before assuming anything more interesting.
If the trail runs cold, the audit log is the last resort and the most useful one — every void, comp, discount and reopened check is stamped with an employee and a time. That is precisely why individual logins matter, and why Getting Started spends so long on them.