No matter the size of your business, a petty cash procedure is inevitable. How else are you going to buy that box of donuts for the staff office Friday afternoon sugar rush? Petty cash is used for minor cash needs – anything from postage, coffee and tea supplies, office supplies or that birthday bunch of flowers.
However, a petty cash tin is so 2019. Gone are the days when you kept $200 locked out the back. Or worse, a biscuit tin under the counter. Trying to balance the petty cash tin is an absolute headache. It never reconciles and always throws up a tangle in the financial string come tax and GST time; no matter how minor your tin is.
There are several different alternatives you can look to when deciding how you want your petty cash process to work. One is to load a prepaid debit card with a certain amount of cash which is trackable online, and can be added to automatically or lets you know when it dips below a certain level. Employees can photograph the receipts for petty cash purchases, which are then stored online via an app, allowing you to go completely paperless if that’s your vibe. Save the trees! This is also a nice way to remove all temptations for small sticky fingers…
However, that much tech may not be your vibe. To rid yourself of the cash tin and help you balance your books, you can still work relatively old school. This is a system that works and one that we’ve implemented in more than 100 pharmacies across Australia. It’s simple and goes a long way to cutting another thing to manage from your workload.
- Decide on the cut off amount for petty cash, whether it’s purchases under $25 or $50. Staff decide they need to purchase something for the shop, whether it’s milk, tea or coffee.
- After being authorised, staff take the amount they need for the purchase from the till, be it a $5 or a $50 note.
- Item is purchased, with the receipt INCLUDING the staff member’s signature placed in the till, along with the change.
- At the end of the day, the receipt is treated as cash so the takings can be balanced.
- The receipt should then be scanned and stored online in the cloud so it can be allocated to the correct expense account for bookkeeping purposes, with all correct GST picked up.
Voila! No more trying to balance that pesky petty cash tin.