Why would a shop put in more in the till than I paid?
- Thread starter Raymond Lin
- Start date
Right, let's say I'm buying something that cost £3. This is the only transaction that goes through the till that day. I give the clerk £5. They put in £5 and the till comes up with £2 change. The clerk gives me £2 change. I now have £3 of goods and £2 of change. The till has £3 of cash. All is well in the world and everyone's books balance.
Let's say that the clerk accidentally hits the 0 key on the way to pressing enter. I have given them £5 but the till thinks I've given them £50, and is telling the clerk to give me £47. OH NO! But never fear! The clerk is a quick thinker, so he figures out that he only needs to give me £2, which he does. I now have £3 of goods and £2 of change. The till has £3 of cash. All is well in the world and everyone's books balance.
I am really, honestly struggling to see how there is any problem with this even in your industary [you] work in [that] requires audit trails for every transaction down to the penny, and [you] don't just mean ammounts [you] mean notes and coins etc. It's a multi million pound business where over half the transctions are cash.
I really can't think why you would need the exact figures going on, or how your "audit trail" would even be able to tell if the right or wrong figures had gone in.
Let's say that the clerk accidentally hits the 0 key on the way to pressing enter. I have given them £5 but the till thinks I've given them £50, and is telling the clerk to give me £47. OH NO! But never fear! The clerk is a quick thinker, so he figures out that he only needs to give me £2, which he does. I now have £3 of goods and £2 of change. The till has £3 of cash. All is well in the world and everyone's books balance.
I am really, honestly struggling to see how there is any problem with this even in your industary [you] work in [that] requires audit trails for every transaction down to the penny, and [you] don't just mean ammounts [you] mean notes and coins etc. It's a multi million pound business where over half the transctions are cash.
I really can't think why you would need the exact figures going on, or how your "audit trail" would even be able to tell if the right or wrong figures had gone in.
Thank you
I was thinking it was an old school till where you enter a value not a till where the item is already programmed into the till.
If you look at it from the way I thought it was my posts make sense, however from the other point of view I look like a looney. So apologies for not understanding what kind of till we were dealing with
Soldato
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2005
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- Bristol
Thank you
I was thinking it was an old school till where you enter a value not a till where the item is already programmed into the till.
If you look at it from the way I thought it was my posts make sense, however from the other point of view I look like a looney. So apologies for not understanding what kind of till we were dealing with
No it doesn't. I used to use tills where you'd punch in the numbers and it could still work out what change was needed if you pressed the round number button. :/
I've been using tills for something like 24 years now and have never come across one that requires the cashier to input anything more that the cost of goods and money handed over, they have all without fail managed to calculate the change.
I'll go and tell all the people I deal with on a daily basis that they're doing it wrong then.
Not all businesses operate a simple transaction system.
I don't troll. If I don't understand something I'll ask for help understanding. If I'm wrong I'll admit it.
Yea, you'd still have to enter the coffee price £3.05
p)It would take more button presses to input £3.05 than a £5 button, and obviously change would be worked out with that crazy algorithm
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I thought the guy had gone to buy a coffee, handed over £3.05 then the guy had entered £5 minus £1.95 change.
What I was saying is that I thought it would be easier to enter £3.05 rather than £5 - 1.95
I didn't realise it was a till which stores the prices, thus meaning less button presses.
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I used to work for Torex, who are one of the biggest players in the EPOS market, and i can tell you now, most of the PC units dont have dualcore PCs. The spec of the box's is truely trafic. Old pentium 4s etc..
They have stockpiles of old PC units which mean the customers dont get newer kits unless they ask for it, despite the fact that the processors have long since gone out of production.
This largely comes down to the EPOS software in use by the shop.
Some use "shortcut buttons" on the touchscreen unit attached to the PC unit. This gives the user a choice of pre defined ammounts that the customer may enter. The £5 in this case would have been one of those buttons. Thus, telling the EPOS software that the customer gave £5 is just a single button press.
Because £3.05 is an exact ammount, there is no preset for this, the user has to press exact ammount button, then manually key in £3.05, so about 4 presses more.
But this isnt the same for every EPOS. Torex offers over 10 different pieces of EPOS software, largely down to hostile takeovers of its competition offering cometing products. Each one is different. Some of them are a joy to use and java based. Others, like lucas are a pain to use and are far from a joy and dont have shortcut buttons at all.
It all depends on the shop, as different customers require bespoke versions of the software. Retail Java is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of EPOS software, but it rarely looks the same from one shop to another as it has customisation built into it from the ground up.
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Seriously what industry do you work in that requires that detailed logging and information detail? Unless you mean banking which isn't really the same.
Not meaning to be rude, I'm actually interested what industry other than banking would require that level of information at the til!
Ditto
most store managers i spoke to just wanted the tills to balance at the end of the day !
User has a bunch of shortcut buttons down the right hand side. These will be £5, £10, £20 etc..
When the cashier hits this button, it does the maths automatically. It knows how much the transaction is, it then does the maths automatically and prompts the cashier to give the customer x ammount of change and opens the cash draw. Its just programming in the EPOS.
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Associate
- Joined
- 9 Jul 2009
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- Manchester
I do this sometimes, just because it is easier to press £5 than it is to press £3.05...
probs nothing to worry about
probs nothing to worry about
what you should have done is demanded your change from he £5 you just gave him, if he refused call the manager
Ha ha, nice.
I've never met anyone who doesn't know how a modern till works before
When I worked at Sainsburys in 1989 (when scanning items was very new) you just had to press 'cash' and it would assume that exact money had been given if you hadn't entered an amount before. No need to press the £5 button.
Have things gone backwards in over 20 years?
Have things gone backwards in over 20 years?