Cash drawers and tills
For any cash, bank or mobile money account you can see what it held at the start of a day, what moved through it, and what it should hold at close.
None of this is stored. It is worked out from the transactions themselves each time you ask, which means a correction you make to yesterday flows through to today automatically. There is no end-of-day process to run and nothing to roll over.
A day on a till
Cash Drawer (Westlands) register, 11 August 2026
opening (yesterday's closing) 5,000
09:00 to 12:00 cash sales +50,000
12:10 transfer to KCB operating account -47,000
15:30 fuel expense, paid from the drawer -2,000
17:45 transfer to KCB operating account -5,500
closing 500
17:50 counted 500. No variance.
Tomorrow's opening balance is 500, because it is the same calculation. Every row can be opened to see the document behind it. The midday banking run is a real transfer document, not a manual adjustment.
Counting the drawer
What the system cannot know is how much cash is physically there. That is what a count records.
Enter the amount counted. Upscale compares it against what the books say should be there at that moment and shows the difference.
- If the count agrees, the count is recorded and nothing is posted. There is nothing to correct.
- If there is a difference, it is posted to Cash Over and Short. A shortage is an expense, a surplus is income. The record of the count and the entry that corrects it are the same document.
The balance the books held at the time of counting is saved with the count. If someone later backdates a transaction into that day, the count still shows the variance that was actually found, rather than being quietly rewritten by a later change.
An account can only be counted once per day. If you need to correct a count, undo it first.
Several tills at once
Mobile money tills are ordinary accounts here, so a business running three paybills and a cash drawer sees each one separately and all of them together. You can filter to just the mobile money accounts to answer "what came through the tills today" without the bank accounts in the way.
What this does not cover
This is the accounting half of the picture. It does not handle shift open and close, assigning a float to a named cashier, or reconciling one cashier against another. Those belong to point of sale management, which is a larger question than accounting.
Moving money between accounts
Banking the drawer's cash, withdrawing M-Pesa float to the till, or sweeping a till into the operating account is one action: Move Money, on the Cash and Bank page and in the Create menu. Pick the account it leaves, the account it arrives in, and the amount. It posts to the ledger as a single transfer (neither side is income or an expense) and shows up in Journals like everything else, so it can be voided if it was recorded wrong.
Banking undeposited receipts
When a customer pays in cash or over a till, the money is real but it is not in the bank yet. Those receipts sit in Undeposited Funds until someone physically banks them.
Choose Undeposited Funds as the account the money leaves, and Move Money turns into a deposit slip: every receipt still awaiting deposit is listed with its customer, number and amount. Tick the ones going to the bank and the amount adds itself up. You cannot type over it, because a deposit has to bank exactly the receipts it names. Otherwise the difference stays behind in Undeposited Funds with nothing to explain it.
Once banked, a receipt stops being offered. So the list always adds up to what the Balance Sheet shows for the account, and Undeposited Funds returns to zero when everything has been taken in.
If someone else banks a receipt while your deposit is open, saving tells you which ones went and asks you to reselect, rather than clearing the same money twice.