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Opening and closing the day

The register runs on shifts. A shift starts with a POS Opening Entry and ends with a POS Closing Entry. In this store the closing normally happens by itself at night, so the morning routine matters more than the evening one.

Opening the register

If no shift is running when you open the register, the Create POS Opening Entry dialog appears.

  1. Check Company.
  2. Pick the POS Profile.
  3. In Opening Balance Details, enter the Opening Amount counted for each mode of payment. In practice this is the cash float.
  4. Click Submit.

POS Opening Entry list

Every shift the register has run, newest first.

Several clerks, one shift

Only one shift runs on the register at a time, and everyone shares it. The second person to open the register that day is put into the shift that is already open, whoever started it.

That is a deliberate change. Out of the box, ERPNext resumes a shift only for the person who opened it while also refusing to let anyone open a second one on the same profile, which leaves the second clerk unable to do either. Here, if you have your own open shift the system uses it, and otherwise it puts you into the register's open shift.

Your name is still on your own sales

Sharing a shift does not share credit. Each invoice records the person who rang it, and each 4473 attestation records the person who confirmed it.

Closing at night

At 23:00 store time, every shift still marked Open is closed automatically. The job builds a POS Closing Entry from the opening, treats the till as matching exactly, and submits it. Submitting the closing consolidates the day's POS Invoices into Sales Invoices, which is what posts stock and the ledger. By the time anyone arrives the next morning the books are done.

POS Closing Entry list

One closing per shift. Last night's should be here.

Two details worth knowing:

  • The automatic close records the counted amount as equal to the expected amount, so there is no cash variance on it. It skips physical cash reconciliation, which is an accepted trade-off in a single-store shop where the owner is also the cashier. If your store wants a counted till, close by hand instead.
  • A shift opened in the last hour before the job runs is left alone, and the next night's run takes it.

Firearm sales do not wait for any of this. A firearm invoice is consolidated the moment the sale completes, so the gun leaves inventory at the sale rather than overnight. See Selling a firearm.

Closing by hand

To close a shift yourself, open the register menu and choose Close the POS. A new POS Closing Entry opens, prefilled with the shift, the cashier and the period. Enter what you counted against each mode of payment in Payment Reconciliation, then submit it.

Forcing a stale shift closed outside the register is limited to Sales Manager, Stock Manager and System Manager.

What to check the next morning

Five minutes, in this order.

  1. POS Opening Entry list. Nothing from yesterday should still be Open. One that is means last night's close did not run, or the shift was opened too late for it. Close it by hand.
  2. POS Closing Entry list. Last night's closing should be there and submitted. A closing in a failed state has a Retry button on it.
  3. Pending 4473 Orders. Ring the Delayed customers whose Brady date has arrived, and clear out anything denied. See Daily checks.
  4. Pending Transfer Pickups. Ring whoever's gun has sat longest. See Customer transfers.
  5. Your notifications. A sale that could not be posted raises a to-do to managers rather than failing silently.

When a sale does not post

There is a known gap in the standard close, and the system works around it. ERPNext's closing entry only picks up invoices created by the person who opened the shift. On a shared register, a sale rung up by anyone else is skipped, and because the close runs once per shift it is never picked up again. The sale shows in the Sales Report while its stock and ledger never post, and nothing complains.

A sweep runs every fifteen minutes and catches exactly this. It re-posts:

  • Any firearm invoice whose immediate posting failed. These are never delayed or batched, because a sold gun has to leave stock.
  • Any invoice from the last thirty days that the nightly close left behind, fifty at a time, originals before their returns.

If an invoice keeps failing, the sweep raises a to-do for managers naming it. A shift left Open for more than three days is treated as abandoned and stops holding its invoices back, so a forgotten shift cannot quietly bury a week of sales.

Troubleshooting

Message you see What it means Fix
Please add Mode of payments and opening balance details. The opening dialog has no payment rows Pick a POS Profile so its payment modes load, then enter the amounts
POS Opening Entry Cancelled The shift you were on was cancelled Refresh the page and open a new shift
Outdated POS Opening Entry The register is holding a shift that has moved on Refresh the page
POS Closing Failed on a closing entry Consolidation hit an error Open the closing entry, read Error, and click Retry
A shift from a previous day is still Open The nightly close missed it Close it by hand, then check that yesterday's sales posted