The Shift the Auditor Picked
An internal auditor picks one cashier and one shift, and asks for every void, refund, discount above limit, price change, no-sale opening and reprinted receipt — with who authorised each, and the drawer variance signed by someone else. What the till holds for each, where to pull it, how often to look, and the parts of the list we can add.
The internal auditor did not ask for a month. She asked for one shift. Till three, the Saturday before last, Daniel’s shift, opening to close. And she put the request in writing, as a list, because she had been given a summary the year before and had spent a week finding out what it left out.
- Every voided sale, and who authorised it.
- Every refund, with the reason, the tender and who processed it.
- Every discount above the cashier’s limit, and who approved it.
- Every price that was changed at the till.
- Every time the drawer opened without a sale.
- Every receipt printed more than once.
- The drawer count, the variance, and the signature of somebody who is not Daniel.
Nothing on that list is exotic. It is the standard cashier exception review, and it exists because nearly every way of taking money out of a till leaves its mark as one of those seven events. A refund to a customer who never came back. A discount for a friend. A sale rung up, printed, handed over, and then reversed after the customer left. A drawer opened for change that was never given. Each one is small. The pattern across a cashier’s shifts is what the auditor is reading.
We have written separately about most of the individual controls — the second signature on a drawer, discounts with a named approver, what a refund has to undo. This post is about the review that sits on top of them: what each line of the auditor’s list maps to in the till, where you pull it, how often somebody should look, and which lines are thinner than the others.
Seven questions, seven different answers
The honest starting point is that the seven items are not seven versions of the same record. Some are controls the till enforces, some are records it keeps, and two are events it does not see at all. An auditor who knows which is which tests each one properly; one who does not ends up sampling an empty population and calling it clean.
| On the list | What the till holds | Where to pull it |
|---|---|---|
| Voids | A completed sale cannot be deleted; it is reversed by a refund | Refunds, below |
| Refunds | A numbered return: reason, tender, who, when, optional customer signature | The sale’s page; sale list by cashier |
| Discounts over limit | Per line: percent, the limit at the time, approver, how approved, reason | The sale’s page; sales summary for totals |
| Price changes | The price is set by the price list, not typed by the cashier | Price list changes in the activity log |
| No-sale openings | Outside the till’s records today | An offer, below |
| Reprints | PDF downloads are logged; the print view is not counted | Activity log, filtered to the user |
| Drawer variance | Count, expected, variance, who closed, who signed, the journal | Cash drawers, filtered to the cashier |
Voids: the event that becomes a refund
Many tills have two kinds of void: a line removed before payment, and a whole sale cancelled afterwards. The second is the dangerous one, and here it does not exist as a separate action. A completed sale cannot be deleted by anyone, whatever their role; the delete action answers with a refusal that points to a refund. So every post-sale void the auditor is looking for arrives as a return, with a return number, and the review of refunds is also the review of voids.
The first kind — a line scanned and then taken off the basket before the customer paid — is a different matter. Until the sale is completed nothing is saved, so a basket that was built and abandoned, or a line scanned and removed, leaves no trace. That is the line on the list most likely to come back empty, and the auditor should know it is empty because nothing is recorded, not because nothing happened. A log of removed lines is the first item in our offer below.
Refunds: what each one carries
A return is its own document with its own number, separate from the sale it reverses. It records the sale, the lines and quantities coming back, the reason, the tender the money went out on — cash, mobile money or card — whether the goods were put back on the shelf, who processed it and when. On the web till the reason is chosen from a short list: changed mind, damaged, wrong item, price adjustment, exchange, other. A refund cannot exceed what is still unreturned on each line, and a serial-numbered item has to come back as the unit that was sold.
Two details matter for the review. A cash refund comes out of the drawer: it is written against the counter’s open drawer as money going out, so it reduces the expected cash for that shift, and a refund paid from the drawer but not recorded shows up as a shortage at the count. And the customer can sign for the refund at the counter or a moment later. The signature is optional, so the unsigned handovers report has a row for till refunds — cash out with no customer signature is the row worth reading first.
What to test
Sample refunds where the processor is the cashier who made the original sale, refunds with the reason other, and cash refunds close to a shift’s close. Today any user who can work the till can process a return, with no second person and no amount limit, so the sample is the control. A supervisor approval on refunds above a set amount is in our offer below.
Discounts above limit: the strongest line
This is the item on the list the till answers most completely, because the discount is judged when it is given rather than reported afterwards. Each workspace sets the percentage a cashier may give beyond an item’s own discount; the default is none. Above it, the till refuses the sale unless a supervisor types their approval PIN at the counter, or the cashier holds the override permission themselves and gives a reason. The supervisor cannot be the cashier, must be active in the same workspace and must hold the override, and all of that is checked on the server rather than trusted from the screen. The mechanics are in the post on discount approval.
What the auditor gets is one record per discounted line: the percentage, the limit that was in force at the time, the cashier, the approver, whether they approved by PIN or by their own permission, and the reason. That middle field matters more than it looks. If the limit was raised in March, a discount in February is judged against February’s limit, not today’s.
One case reads differently. A sale made on the mobile app while offline reaches the server later, after the goods have gone. An over-limit discount on that sale is kept rather than refused — refusing it would lose the sale and the cash from the books — and it is marked as flagged for review. Clearing the flag records who reviewed it and when; the amount stays exactly as it was given.
Discount questions for each shift
- Who approved each discount above the limit, and by PIN or by their own permission?
- Does one supervisor approve most of one cashier’s overrides?
- Is any flagged offline discount still waiting for review?
- Do the reasons say something, or the same word every time?
- Does the cashier’s total discount for the period, from the sales summary, look like their colleagues’?
Price changes: a population that should be empty
The till does not take a price from the cashier. When a sale is saved, the price of each line is decided on the server — the customer’s price list if they have one, then the default list, then the item’s own price — whatever the screen sent. So “every price changed at the till” is an empty population by design, and the test moves upstream: who changed the price lists and item prices, and when. On the web those edits are in the activity log with the user’s name.
The one place a price correction does appear at the counter is after the sale, as a return with the reason price adjustment. Those belong in the refund sample.
No-sale openings and reprints: the thin lines
These two are where the trail is thinnest, and it is better to say so before the auditor asks. The till does not drive the cash drawer, so a drawer opened with a key or a button to give change has no event behind it. And a receipt opened again from the print view looks the same as the first print; only a receipt downloaded as a PDF from the web is written to the activity log, with the user and the time. Recorded no-sale openings and counted, marked reprints are both in our offer below.
Until then, the drawer itself is the control for both. A no-sale opening that takes money shows as a shortage at the count, and a reprinted receipt used to support a fake refund still needs the refund — which is numbered, named and in the sample.
The drawer: signed by somebody else
The last item on the list is fully built. When a drawer closes, the till stores the opening float, the net cash sales, the drops, the expected cash, the counted cash, the variance and who closed it, and the drawer waits for a sign-off. The sign-off needs its own permission and cannot be given by the person who closed the drawer. When it is given, a non-zero variance is journalled between cash and Cash Over and Short with the drawer’s number as reference, and the reviewer, the time and their note are stored beside it. The full sequence is in the drawer that needs a second signature.
For the review, filter the cash drawers list to the cashier and the dates, or to drawers still waiting for review. The shift summary report adds the picture across a time window: transactions and sales per cashier and per counter, payments by tender, and declared cash against expected with a tolerance you set — marked provisional while any drawer in the window is still open.
Read a zero variance carefully
The till shows the cashier the expected cash for their drawer. A cashier who can see the figure can count to it, so a long run of exact zeros is a reason to look, not a reason to relax. We wrote about that in the number the cashier can see, and a blind close is in our offer below.
What nobody can quietly change afterwards
An exception review is only worth doing on records that cannot be tidied before the auditor arrives. Here is what holds.
- Sales are never deleted. A reversal is a new, numbered return that sits beside the sale.
- Discount records are written once. A review adds a name and a time; the percentage, approver and reason do not change.
- A signature is taken once and never replaced, on a sale or on a refund.
- A signed-off drawer stays signed off, with its variance journal and its signer.
- Every action at the web till is in the activity log — sales, refunds, drawer opens, drops, closes and sign-offs — with the user, the time and the address it came from. Each entry is chained to the one before, so an edit or a removed row is caught when an administrator runs the check, as described in an audit trail nobody can delete.
The records themselves carry names wherever the action was taken. The separate activity-log entry is written for the web till today; the same entry for till actions taken in the mobile app is part of our offer.
The routine: how often to look
The auditor’s request is a point-in-time test. The organizations that pass it easily are the ones that already run the same review on a cadence, so that the auditor is checking a routine rather than starting one.
-
Every morning: yesterday’s drawers
Filter the cash drawers list to those waiting for review and get each one signed by somebody other than the cashier. A drawer left unsigned for a week is a variance nobody looked at.
-
Every week: each cashier’s exceptions
For each cashier, pull the week’s sales from the sale list and open those with returns or discounts; check the shift summary for the variance pattern; clear any flagged offline discounts.
-
Every week: unsigned refunds
Run the unsigned handovers report for till refunds and follow up the cash ones.
-
Every month: price and permission changes
Read the activity log for price list edits and for who was given the discount override and the drawer sign-off permission.
-
Every month: the chain check
Have an administrator verify the activity log chain and keep the result with the month’s review.
An exception review that runs every week is evidence. One that is assembled the week the auditor asks is a reconstruction.
Seven additions that complete the auditor’s list
Discounts and drawer sign-off are enforced at the till, refunds and sales are numbered and permanent, and the web activity log is chained. What follows turns the rest of the list into records, and puts the whole review on one screen.
One exception report per cashier per shift
Refunds, over-limit discounts, flagged offline discounts and the drawer result for a cashier and a period, on one page with an export.
Supervisor approval on larger refunds
A workspace amount above which a refund needs a supervisor’s PIN, recorded with their name, as discounts already do.
A log of lines removed before payment
Each line scanned and taken off a basket, and each basket abandoned, kept with the cashier and the time.
Recorded no-sale openings
A no-sale action that opens a connected drawer and records who, when and why.
Counted, marked reprints
Each reprint numbered, marked as a copy on the paper, and listed against the cashier.
A blind close
Expected cash hidden from the cashier until the count is entered.
App actions in the activity log
The same chained entry for sales, refunds and drawer actions taken in the mobile app as for the web till.
The exception report is the piece most auditors would notice first; it reads records that already exist. The others are small additions to the till and the receipt.
Tell us what your auditor asks forFive questions for whoever runs your till system
Can a completed sale be voided, and by whom?
What you will probably hear
A supervisor can void it.
How to read it
Ask what is left afterwards. If the sale disappears, the review has nothing to sample. A reversal that is its own numbered document is the version an auditor can test.
When a discount goes over the limit, what is stored?
What you will probably hear
The discount amount.
How to read it
Ask for the approver, how they approved, and the limit in force at the time. Without the limit, an old discount is judged against today’s policy.
Can the cashier type a price?
What you will probably hear
Only with a manager’s code.
How to read it
Then price overrides are a real population and need their own list. If the price comes from the price list on the server, the test moves to who edits the price lists.
Who may sign off a drawer?
What you will probably hear
A manager.
How to read it
Ask whether the system stops the cashier who closed it from signing it. A rule written in a procedure manual is not the same as one the till enforces.
Can the activity log be edited or trimmed?
What you will probably hear
Only by an administrator.
How to read it
That is the person most likely to be reviewed. A trail where each entry is chained to the one before, with a check you can run, is the version that survives that question.
The short version
A cashier exception review is seven questions, and a till answers them differently. Ours enforces two at the counter — discounts above the limit need a named approver, and the drawer variance needs somebody other than the closer — keeps refunds and sales as numbered records nobody can delete, takes prices from the price list rather than the cashier, and chains every web-till action in the activity log. Voids are reviewed as refunds. No-sale openings, reprints and removed basket lines are the thin part of the list today, and a single per-cashier exception report is the piece we would build first. Run the review weekly and the auditor’s request becomes an export.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Sales that cannot be deleted: a completed sale is reversed only by a numbered return beside it.
- Refunds as their own documents, with reason, tender, restock, who processed them and when, an optional customer signature, cash refunds taken out of the counter’s open drawer, and the journals reversed for the returned portion.
- Discounts above the workspace limit refused at the till unless a supervisor approves by PIN or the cashier holds the override and gives a reason, recorded per line with the limit in force at the time; offline over-limit discounts kept and flagged for a named review.
- Prices set on the server from the price list, never typed by the cashier.
- Drawer sign-off by somebody other than the person who closed it, with the variance journalled to Cash Over and Short and the signer, time and note stored.
- Cash drawers and sales listed by cashier and date, with exports, a shift summary per cashier and counter, a sales summary with total discount per cashier, and refunds in the unsigned handovers report.
- A chained activity log of web-till actions, with a verification an administrator can run.
More we can add to your workspace
- A single exception report per cashier per shift, gathering refunds, over-limit and flagged discounts and the drawer result with an export.
- Supervisor approval on refunds above a set amount, recorded with the approver’s name, as discounts already are.
- A log of lines removed before payment and of baskets abandoned, kept with the cashier and the time.
- Recorded no-sale openings of a connected drawer, with who, when and why.
- Counted and marked reprints, each one listed against the cashier and printed as a copy.
- A blind close, with the expected cash hidden from the cashier until the count is entered.
- Activity-log entries for till actions in the mobile app, matching the web till; the records themselves already carry the user.
- Wrong approval PINs in the activity log, alongside the lock that already engages after repeated attempts.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not offer a way to delete or edit a completed sale, a refund or a signed-off drawer. A correction is a new record beside the old one, because a review that can be tidied before the auditor arrives is not evidence.
- We do not decide what your discount limit, refund threshold or variance tolerance should be. Those are your policy; the till enforces and records whatever you set.
The per-cashier exception report reads records that already exist and is the natural first piece; the others are small additions to the till and the receipt, and we would quote them together.
See the point of sale
Discount limits with supervisor approval, numbered refunds, drawer sign-off by a second person, and reports by cashier and shift.
Explore point of saleFrequently asked questions
Can a cashier void a completed sale?
No. A completed sale cannot be deleted by anyone, whatever their role. It is reversed by a refund, which is its own numbered document recording the reason, the tender, who processed it and when, so every post-sale void appears in the refund review.
Who can approve a discount above the cashier’s limit?
A supervisor who holds the discount override permission, is active in the same workspace, has set an approval PIN and is not the cashier. They type their PIN at the till. A cashier who holds the override themselves can give the discount with a reason. Either way the approver, the method and the limit in force at the time are stored on the discount.
Can a cashier change the price of an item at the till?
No. The price of each line is decided on the server when the sale is saved, from the customer’s price list, then the default list, then the item’s own price. Price corrections after a sale appear as refunds with the reason price adjustment.
Can the cashier who closed a drawer also sign it off?
No. Sign-off needs its own permission and is refused for the person who closed the drawer. When a different person signs, any variance is journalled to Cash Over and Short and their name, the time and their note are stored with the drawer.
Are reprinted receipts and no-sale drawer openings recorded?
Receipts downloaded as a PDF from the web are written to the activity log with the user and time, but reopening the print view is not counted, and the till does not record no-sale drawer openings. Both are additions we can make. Until then, the drawer count is the control: money taken on a no-sale opening shows as a shortage.
How often should we run a cashier exception review?
Sign off drawers daily, review each cashier’s refunds, discounts and variances weekly, and read price and permission changes and verify the activity log monthly. A review that runs on a cadence turns an auditor’s request into an export rather than a reconstruction.
