Rounding Cash to the Nickel
Some stores cannot reliably make small change. Cash rounding settles an all-cash sale on the nearest five cents so the drawer can tender exactly, without changing what the sale was actually worth.
It is off everywhere unless an administrator turns it on.
What it does, and what it does not do
Rounding changes what the customer hands over. It does not change the sale.
The sale keeps its exact subtotal, its exact sales tax and its exact donation. The difference — never more than two cents — is recorded separately and booked to its own account. A $43.27 sale rounded down is still a $43.27 sale; the customer simply pays $43.25 and the two cents are accounted for on their own line.
This matters in three places. The sales tax your affiliate remits still matches the tax it collected. A customer who donated $1.00 has a receipt that says $1.00. And the drawer's over/short — the figure a store uses to spot theft — stays clean, because intended rounding never lands in it.
When it applies
- Cash only. A card is charged the exact amount, always.
- The whole tender must be cash. A sale split between cash and a card never rounds: the card leg was charged an exact amount and the cash leg just settles the balance.
- Only at stores where it is switched on.
At the register
If your affiliate set rounding to apply automatically, the cash screen simply shows Cash due — the rounded figure — with the sale's total underneath it, and change is calculated from the rounded figure. There is nothing to do.
If your affiliate chose to ask each time, the cash screen shows a Settle on 5¢ control with both amounts. Turn it on to ask for the rounded figure, or leave it off to ask for the exact total. Each sale starts fresh — declining for one customer does not decline for the next.
Either way the receipt shows the sale's total, then a Cash rounding line beneath it, then what was actually collected.
How round-up donations and cash rounding interact
They do not collide. Every round-up amount lands on a multiple of five cents, so a sale carrying a round-up is already sitting on the nickel and the cash rounding works out to nothing. The customer is asked for one number and it is the number they agreed to.
Turning it on
An administrator sets this up under Administration → POS Settings → Checkout Giving, in the Cash rounding section.
- Direction — Always down never asks a customer for more than the marked price plus tax, and costs the store about two cents a cash sale. Nearest rounds one and two cents down and three and four cents up, so it comes out roughly even, but it does round some sales up.
- Ask the cashier each time — off applies it to every all-cash sale without asking the cashier; on shows the cashier both amounts and lets them decide. Either way it only applies on a register that shows the rounded figure — both the web register and the iPad app do, and a register that cannot read the figure (the connection dropped, say) asks for the exact amount instead.
- By store — the same default / on / off control as giving.
Press Save at the bottom of the page. Rounding then applies from the next cash sale on either register: the cash screen asks the server what the tender settles at every time it opens, so there is nothing to refresh on the iPad. With Always down and no prompt, a sale whose total already sits on the nickel shows no rounding line, which is correct rather than a sign that it is off; ring a total ending in 1 to 4 cents to see it.
Why the switch may be greyed out, and how to fix it
Cash rounding cannot be switched on until a rounding account is chosen. The adjustment is real money leaving or staying in the till, and it has to land somewhere you picked rather than somewhere Ayuna guessed.
You can set it in either of two places, and they write the same thing.
The quick way is Rounding account, at the bottom of the Cash rounding card. Type the account id or name your books use — the same kind of value as the income and deposit accounts on your account mapping — and press Save account. It saves on its own, without waiting for Save, because it is what unlocks the switch above it. If you sync a chart of accounts, your active expense and revenue accounts appear as suggestions as you type; you are never limited to them.
The other way is Accounting → Account mappings, on the mapping your store sales book against. The rounding account sits with the income, deposit, fee and sales tax accounts, because it is the same kind of setting and the journal entry reads all five off the same row. When your accounting integration is connected you pick from a list; when it is not, you type the id, exactly as you do for the other four.
Which mapping is that? A POS sale looks for one in this order: the mapping the store is pointed at in Store Management, then a store mapping made for that store, then your affiliate-wide store mapping, then your default. For most affiliates that is Default — Store Sales, and the Cash rounding card names the one it is writing to.
An income or expense account is the right home — a rounding adjustment is a gain or a loss, never an asset. Expense suits the usual setup, where rounding always goes down and the affiliate absorbs the couple of cents; a revenue account suits a store rounding to nearest. Either works, because the adjustment is signed and one account carries both directions.
Two things can still stop you.
“There is no default account mapping.” The choice is stored on a mapping, and you have none. Create one under Accounting → Account mappings, mark it the default, then come back.
A store on its own mapping. If a store points at a mapping of its own, that mapping needs a rounding account too — its sales post against it. This does not hold up the affiliate switch: rounding simply stays off at that store until its mapping has an account, and every other store rounds as normal. The Cash rounding card names each such store and links straight to the mapping to fix; the By store list says the same beside the store, so a store showing Rounding: on but Cash rounding off always tells you why.
Do not choose your drawer over/short account. Over/short is how a store notices that money is going missing, and a few dollars a day of intended rounding laid on top of it hides real shrink — permanently, and invisibly. Ayuna cannot enforce this one for you: nothing in your books marks which account that is, so it is the one part of the setup you have to get right by knowing them yourself.