Money and the account

Expenses and the cash book

Menu: Money → Expenses · Money → Recurring expenses · Money → Petty cash · Setup → Expense categories · Who: owner, branch manager, and a cashier for what was paid out of the till

Sellify has always been able to tell you what an outlet sold, and what those sales cost it off the stock ledger. This is the missing third: what it spent. With all three, an outlet's operating profit is a page you can read rather than a figure somebody works out on paper at the end of the month.

Where the money came from

Every expense says which pile of money it came out of, and that is the one question the form insists on:


Till	Straight out of the drawer. The shift's expected cash drops by it, so the cashier counting at eleven is short by exactly that and knows why.
Petty cash	The branch's own cash box. Its balance drops by it.
Bank	A transfer, a cheque, a card. No drawer moves at all.

This is not a preference, it is a fact about the expense. A restaurant pays the sabzi wala Rs 800 out of the till at the door, the plumber Rs 4,000 out of the manager's box, and the landlord Rs 200,000 by transfer — three expenses, three different piles of money, and all of it one ordinary Tuesday. Rent recorded as a till expense would make every drawer in the shop look short by two hundred thousand rupees.

Recording one

Menu: Money → Expenses

Pick the category, say who was paid, type the amount, and say where the money came from. A photo of the receipt is optional unless the branch asked for one above a figure (Settings → Expenses).

A cashier may record what was paid out of the till, and nothing else. The doorstep purchase happens at their counter in front of a customer, and a cashier who cannot record it hands over money that nothing in Sellify ever hears about. The box and the bank are not at their counter, so they are not offered. Turn it off entirely under Settings → Expenses if only a manager should record anything.

There is no approval step and that is deliberate. The record is the guard: who spent it, when, on what, against which category, with the receipt photographed. That is what an owner reads on a Sunday, and a PIN at the door would not have added a word to it. A shop that wants a wall puts it in front of the petty cash top-up, which is where the money actually moves.

It lands on the branch's own business day. Money handed over at 2am at a shop whose day starts at 7am belongs to the day before — exactly as a sale rung at that hour does. A day that is already closed refuses it; a manager reopens the day first, on the record.

A staff advance

Money given to an employee is an ordinary expense with the Staff advance category and that person's name on it. There is no separate ledger for it — recovering it from a salary is payroll, which is coming.

Fixing one

An expense is voided, never edited, the same promise a received purchase and a paid sale already make. The money goes back to whatever it came out of, the row keeps its number, and the reason is on the record. Editing one would rewrite a figure somebody has already read.

The petty cash box

Menu: Money → Petty cash · Who: owner, branch manager

The branch's own cash box, with its running statement and its balance.

Top up moves cash from the till into the box. This is the one movement that touches both: the drawer is short by it and the box is up by it.
Adjust corrects the box against a physical count, with a reason that is required. A box that cannot be corrected is a box somebody stops counting.

A top-up is not a spend. It looks like a payout in the drawer and like income in the box, and it is neither — the same rupee in a different pocket. It nets to nothing across the shop and never appears as a cost on any report.

The balance is counted from the box's own rows, so it cannot drift and there is nothing to reset. The statement opens with what the box was holding before the window you asked for, not at zero.

A box can read below zero, and the screen says so. More has been paid out of it than was ever put in — a top-up somebody never recorded, or a person who paid out of their own pocket and is owed it back. Sellify does not refuse the expense: the money really did go, and refusing to record it would leave the books more wrong than the negative does. Top the box up, or correct it with a reason.

What a drawer is expected to hold

The declaration a cashier closes a shift against now reads both directions:

  opening float
+ cash taken over the counter
+ paid in on account
− cash refunded
− paid out          ← a till expense, and anything moved into the box
─────────────────
  expected in the drawer

Each thing paid out is listed on the declaration too, under Paid out — the expense's head, who was paid and its number ("Kitchen gas · Sabzi wala (EXP-0012)") — on the till's close-shift screen and on the printed Declaration Sales Report alike. The lines add up to the "paid out" figure, so a cashier counting the notes can see where the rest of the drawer went.

And the Z report carries two figures, never one: what the branch spent today whatever pile it came out of, and how much of that left a till. They answer different questions and a single figure would be read as drawer money by whichever screen looked at it second.

On the till

Menu: Expenses (in the rail, or under ⋮ on a phone) Who: owner, branch manager, and a cashier where the branch allows it

The Android and Windows till has the same three acts a counter actually does:

Record what was paid out — the amount, what it was for, who it went to, and a bill number and note if there are any. It is posted straight away, because the money has already gone.
What left the counter today, with a total. The total counts what is still standing; a voided one stays on the list as history, struck through, and out of the figure.
Void — a manager only, with a reason.

Which pocket it came out of is not a question a cashier is asked. They have a till and nothing else, so the sheet tells them. A manager gets the three.

The heads are the ones in your own list — the same list the panel uses. A till never invents one.

It works with no internet. The chai wala does not wait for the router. A spend written on a dark till is kept on the device, listed with a clock beside it and counted against the drawer straight away — and it goes up by itself when the line is back, filed on the day the money actually left, not the day it synced.

Two things follow from that, and the screen says both:

The rest of today's list is the server's, so a till with no connection shows only what it is itself holding.
A day will not close while a spend is still waiting on a till. That drawer would be expected to hold money which has already gone.

If the server refuses one when it finally goes up — almost always because that business day has since been closed — the row says so and waits. A manager reopens the day and it goes.

Correcting your own mistake. Rs 8,000 typed for Rs 800: void it and write it again. A cashier can void what they recorded while their drawer is still open — after the shift is counted, or for somebody else's, a manager does it. A posted expense is never edited, here or on the panel: the figure may already have been read on a report, so the correction is written beside it rather than over it.

What stays on the panel: recurring expenses, the petty cash box, the expense categories themselves and the reports. Those are done at a desk by the person whose job they are.

The ones that come round again

Menu: Money → Recurring expenses · Who: owner, branch manager

A template is a saved expense with no date: the category, who is paid, where the money comes from, and the amount if it is always the same one.

Draft it now — one tap writes a draft whenever the bill turns up. This is the whole feature for most shops, and needs nothing else set up.
Draft it every month by itself — switch it on, give it a day of the month, and Sellify writes the draft on that day without anybody asking.

A template never posts by itself. It drafts, and a person opens the draft, reads the actual bill, types what was really paid and presses Save. Rent that posted on the 1st whether or not it was paid is a figure nobody can trust.

Leave the amount empty for anything that changes — an electricity bill is a different figure every month. The draft comes out at zero, which is the honest shape of somebody has to read the bill.

Then type the figure on the draft itself. On Money → Expenses a draft carries an Edit button beside Post it: open it, put in what the bill actually says, save, and then post it. An expense of nothing is refused, so a draft with no figure on it can never reach a report by accident.

Only a draft is edited. Once an expense is posted it is voided and never changed — an owner may already have read it on a profit & loss, and a figure that can be rewritten behind them is not a figure. A draft has moved no money and reached no report, so there is nothing there to rewrite.

A template set for the 31st falls on the last day of the month. February gets the 28th (or the 29th), not a skipped month.

A draft touches no drawer, no box and no report until it is posted. Deleting a template leaves every expense it produced exactly where it is — a template is a rule, not a record.

Is this outlet making money

Menu: Reporting → Reports → Profit & loss (under Money)

The page the whole thing is for. All three figures are already Sellify's, so it reads without a single account code existing:

  Revenue            what you rang, after discount, before tax
                     — plus what you charged to deliver it
− Returns            what a customer handed back, at the sale's own price
  ────────────────
  Net revenue        what you actually kept
− Cost of sales      what really left the shelf, at what it was worth
− Wastage & losses   counted apart, never buried in the line above
  ────────────────
  Gross profit
− Expenses           by your own category
  ────────────────
  Operating profit

Every line carries its share of net revenue, which is the figure an owner actually compares between outlets: "food cost is 34% here and 41% there" cannot be said with money alone. Net revenue is the 100%; Revenue above it reads a little over, by whatever came back.

The rows do not move with the month. A shop that took nothing back still reads Returns 0.00 and a net revenue equal to its revenue — so March and April can be laid side by side with the same lines in the same places.

The delivery charge is revenue. It is money the customer paid you for a service you performed, and it is on the Revenue line with the goods. Writing a bill off as FOC leaves it standing, for the same reason: the delivery was still made.

It is outlet-wise, and that is the point. A four-outlet chain usually has one shop carrying the others and no way to see it.

Cost of sales is the ledger's, not the recipe's. The food cost report answers what a dish should cost; this answers what the shop really consumed. The two disagree by exactly the wastage and the count variance — which is the most useful number in the building, and why they are never folded into one figure.

Wastage is its own line. Inside cost of sales it would vanish into gross profit, and a kitchen throwing out forty thousand rupees a month would read as a kitchen with a thin margin. It counts what you wrote off — damaged, expired, stolen, lost in transit — and what a stock count came up short by, which is a real loss however it happened. A count that came up OVER reduces the line rather than adding to it.

What it leaves out, and the page says so: this is an operating profit. No depreciation, no payroll accrual, no tax on profit, no financing cost. If your accountant's figure differs, that is where it differs.

Two beside it

Expenses by category — what you spent, biggest first, with a chart. Narrow it to one category to answer "how much rent did this shop pay this year".
Petty cash — the box's statement: every movement in order, with the balance running down the side and what was brought forward at the top. One branch at a time, because a cash box belongs to an outlet.

Expense categories

Menu: Setup → Expense categories · Who: owner

Your own words for what you spend on. Every company starts with a list picked for what it trades — a restaurant gets kitchen gas and packaging, a shop gets display and carry bags, and everybody gets rent, electricity and salaries.

A category that expenses already point at is hidden rather than removed, so the old expenses keep their grouping. Writing the same name again brings it back with its history on it.