How to set up an end of day cash process for your salon

You've taken on your first staff members and suddenly the money side of the day feels a lot less tidy. More people are checking clients out, more transactions are going through, and you need a proper end of day cash process your whole team can follow. Here's the exact system I use in my salon.

What an end of day process actually involves

End of day is the routine where you check that every dollar you've taken matches up across three places:

• Your booking or POS system (for me that's Timely)
• The cash physically sitting in your till
• Your EFTPOS or card terminal settlement report

Every service, retail sale, booking fee and deposit should line up across all three. When they don't, something has gone wrong. Maybe a card payment was recorded as cash, a client was charged for the wrong service, or someone got so caught up booking a client's next six months of appointments that nobody took payment.

Why one count at close doesn't cut it

My salon is open until 8pm most nights, and nobody's brain works properly at that hour. Hunting for a $127 gap across a full day, when the person who made the mistake went home at 5pm, is miserable.

So we count three times a day:

1. Midday. We run the transaction summary and physically count the till. If something's out, there are only three or four hours of transactions to look through.
2. Before my manager leaves at 4.30pm. A second dummy count. Any mistake has happened since lunch, and everyone who processed those payments is still in the salon to ask.
3. Close. The team only checks transactions since the last count, so they're out the door quickly.

If you're solo or have one staff member, a single end of day count may be plenty. Once you've got more than two or three people taking payments, add at least one check earlier in the day.

Closing out the cash and banking

Once everything balances, the takings go into the safe and the float stays in the till for tomorrow. Anything unsolved goes into the reception diary so my manager or I can follow it up next morning.

Banking happens once a week. We run a report from the last banking date up to yesterday, count the safe and make sure it matches. This is where small slip-ups show up, like a $50 note accidentally moved from the float into the safe.

Security that protects your team and your takings

A few extras make a big difference:

• Two people rostered on to close
• CCTV covering reception and the salon floor, so you can check whether a client handed over cash, a card, or walked out without paying
• A daily settlement report emailed from your card provider to compare against your booking system

Your team follows your lead with money

When you never check the numbers, your team notices. Discounts creep in, change gets handed back carelessly, and nobody feels accountable. I've worked with plenty of beauty business owners whose booking system says they took $10,000 last week while the bank says $8,500, and it's usually because these checks aren't in place.

If you're thinking "my team won't want to count the till", remember that almost every business handling in-person payments has some kind of end of day process. Keep yours simple, write it as clear steps, and pay your team for the time. My closing team get paid an extra 15 minutes every shift.

Nervous about staff seeing daily totals? Walk them through where the money goes. In my salon, around half goes straight to wages before rent, tax, products and outgoings.

Start the habit now

I balanced my till every single day back when I worked on my own, and it set me up for growing a team. A solid end of day cash process is boring, and it's one of the best ways to protect the money your salon brings in.

If you want support putting systems like this in place, come and join us inside The Salon Goals Academy.