Paid in cash....can I use the 'Cash Register' tool?

Firstly - apologies if this is answered elsewhere and for what is, probably, a very ‘basic’ question. I am just setting up a (Sole Trader) household cleaning business and most of my customers pay in cash (a few pay via standing order). I have a few questions…

  1. If a customer pays me cash and I keep some as ‘spending money’ (either personal, or for stock - cleaning products etc.) before paying the rest into my bank, how do I enter that in QuickFile?
  2. For those entries that are paid in cash can I use the ‘Cash Register’ tool - would that be beneficial to me or not?
  3. Should I give the customers receipts (are ‘receipts’ the same as ‘invoices’:confused::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:??!!!)
    I’m sure I will have loads more questions in the coming days/weeks…thank you in advance for any help you can offer!

It makes most sense for me to answer these questions in reverse order…

Question 3: yes, you should give your customers some sort of record of how much they have paid you, but this doesn’t have to be a full-blown QuickFile invoice. Typically I’d imagine that for a small-scale business like this you’d be fine with handwritten receipts in a duplicate book - give the top copy to the customer and keep the duplicate for your own records.

Question 2: at the end of each day/week you could then total up all your duplicate receipts and create one “invoice” in QuickFile for that total amount to a dummy client called something like “cash sales” (and put the receipt numbers from the duplicate book as the invoice description so you can relate it back to the original records if you need to in future). Mark this invoice as paid into the “petty cash” bank account in QuickFile. The cash register tool provides a way to streamline this process, particularly if you’re trying to reconcile a whole month or more in one go.

Question 1: At this point the cash you have been paid by customers shows as a balance in the “petty cash” account on QuickFile. Now any business-related expenses (cleaning products) that you pay for in cash can be logged in QuickFile as purchases paid from petty cash, any cash you take for personal use would be a bank transfer from petty cash to proprietor’s drawings, and cash you pay into the bank would be a transfer from petty cash to current account.

For your standing order customers where they’re paying you a fixed amount per week/month I’d consider setting them up as proper clients in QuickFile and billing them using the recurring invoice mechanism, separately from your cash sales.

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Thank you very much, Ian! All my questions are now (fairly) clear in my mind! However, the issue of my standing order customers raises another query…if they have set up regular standing orders, why would I bill them? Or would I somehow mark the bills/invoices as ‘Paid’ before I send them…i.e. send them after the end of the 4-week period that their standing order covers?

You could do that, yes - set up a recurring invoice so it is raised every four weeks on the day the SO payment arrives, then you can mark it as paid immediately. Or you could do it all from the bank side, when you see a SO payment arrive you tag it as payment from a customer, create new invoice, choose the customer name and QuickFile will create an invoice dated that day which is already marked as paid.

You can even define rules to make this all happen automatically, so whenever the system sees a money in transaction on the account with the appropriate description (which depends on your bank but will probably be something along the lines of “FPS Credit J Bloggs”) then it will immediately create an invoice for the correct client, and possibly even email it to them automatically (I don’t use this feature myself so I’m a bit sketchy on it, the full details are at Automated bank tagging rules).

Thank you again, Ian! I will probably need to do a little experimentation as I go along…!:blush::roll_eyes:

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