Making the till agree with the bank

POS reconciliation proves that what your tills recorded, what your bank received and what your books say are the same story. It matches each day's Z-report to the acquirer's settlement, the cash banking slip, the aggregator remittance and the gift-card movement — and explains every difference. Without it a store cannot support a turnover declaration, cannot detect till theft, and cannot rely on its own gross margin.

Because acquirers settle net of their merchant service charge, and because the settlement covers a cut-off window that rarely matches your trading day. A card sale rung at 11pm may fall into the next day's settlement batch; a refund processed today reduces today's settlement even though it relates to a sale last month. The commission itself is an expense, not a reduction in revenue — booking settlements as revenue understates both your sales and your costs, which quietly distorts your turnover declaration and your margin.

A gift card sold is cash received but not revenue earned — it is a contract liability until the customer redeems it or the card breaks. Recognise revenue on redemption, carry the unredeemed balance as a liability, and only recognise breakage when you have a reasonable basis for expecting it. Separately, check what your lease does with vouchers, because turnover for rent purposes and revenue for accounting purposes may be recognised at different moments.

Gross, with the commission as an expense. Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem and noon deliver an order worth AED 100 and remit perhaps AED 70 after commission; the sale is AED 100 of revenue and AED 30 of commission expense, not AED 70 of revenue. Recording the net remittance understates revenue, hides a substantial cost line, and — where the lease defines turnover on gross order value — under-declares turnover rent. It also makes food cost percentage look wrong, because cost of sales is measured against an understated revenue base.

Timing differences can be large and are fine so long as they are identified and clear the following period. Genuinely unexplained variance is a different matter: many retailers set a tolerance of a fraction of a percent of daily takings and investigate anything above it. The number matters less than the discipline — a store that reconciles daily and investigates same-week finds problems while they are small, and can show a landlord's auditor exactly why a day's figures differ.