Cash management software that answers where the money physically is

Safes, till floats, drops, counts and banking on one append-only ledger, reconciled against the day's cash-up, with every variance raised at the moment somebody saves it rather than a fortnight later.

14-day free trial, no credit card. Included in Professional at £149 per site per month.

Takings are recorded. The cash itself is not.

Most venues can tell you what they took last Friday. Far fewer can tell you where that cash is standing right now — how much is in the safe, how much is sitting in floats, what went to the bank on Tuesday and whether it has actually cleared. That gap is where money goes missing, and it goes missing quietly, because nothing in a spreadsheet objects when a number is changed after the fact.

Zynthio's cash office is deliberately narrow: safes, till floats, one ledger and its settings. Every movement is a typed row in that ledger — drop from till, banking, change order, paid out, paid in, float top-up, float return, safe count, till count, adjustment, opening balance — and the amount is always positive because the direction comes from the type. No balance is stored anywhere; every figure on screen is derived by summing the rows. It is boring on purpose, and it is the only way a cash trail survives contact with a busy August.

What you stop doing

• Reconstructing a safe balance from a drawer full of envelopes
• Overwriting last week's figure to make this week's balance work
• Wondering whether Tuesday's banking ever reached the account
• Finding out about a £300 shortfall at the end of the period
• Typing a safe drop that the till already knows about

From the drawer to the bank

Safes, floats and one append-only ledger

A site can hold more than one safe, and each till float is a rolling float with a target that can be tied to a specific EPOS terminal. Every movement between them is a row in a single ledger, and that ledger is append-only: there is no edit and no delete. Even a super admin corrects a balance by writing an adjustment, which leaves the earlier history byte-identical. Only two things can change on a written row — whether the bank credited it, and its note. If somebody asks in March what happened to a Saturday in October, the answer is in the ledger rather than in somebody's recollection.

Counts that record a disagreement, not a fix

A count records the physical amount against the book amount and stores the denomination breakdown behind it. A count moves no money: it records a disagreement, and it is never automated, because the platform asserts what is expected while a person asserts what is counted. Safe and till counts carry a five pound tolerance by default and banking carries zero; anything over tolerance cannot be saved without a written reason. Witnesses are optional by default and can be made mandatory for safe counts, where a team member is a perfectly valid witness — but you can never witness your own count.

Terminal-linked drops from the till

Where a site runs ZynthioEPOS, a safe drop declared on the till posts itself into the ledger when the drawer is sealed, provided the module is enabled, auto-posting is on for the site, and the site has exactly one active safe. It is written inside the seal's own transaction and is idempotent against a re-seal, so a replay cannot double it up. Alongside that sits a pending-drops worklist: submitted and approved cash-ups from the last three days whose declared cash has no matching drop, netted against anything already auto-posted, so an eight-hundred-and-forty-pound sheet with six hundred posted shows two hundred and forty outstanding. The list is derived fresh and writes nothing; clicking a line pre-fills the drop.

Banking, holding limits and outstanding money

A banking is a ledger row carrying the reference from the deposit slip or envelope, and you mark it credited when it lands, with the date and amount. That mark is manual: there is no bank feed and no statement import in this module, and we would rather be plain about it than imply a reconciliation that does not exist. Anything uncredited shows as outstanding, and each safe carries a days-since-banking figure. Set a maximum holding per safe and Zynthio alerts you in-app and by push when it is exceeded — a site with two safes is over when either one is — though the limit never refuses a ledger entry, because refusing to record cash that exists is how cash stops being recorded.

Cash-up reconciliation with variance

The daily cash-up sheet answers the other half of the question: what did this site take today. One sheet per site per day, moving from open to submitted to approved, with two columns on every line — imported from the till, and actual as counted and typed. Tenders cover cash, card, gift cards, the delivery aggregators, Dojo card, other tenders, service charge and payouts, with net worked out on the gross. Covers and labour auto-fill from settled bills and HR clock data, and the auto-fill never touches a figure a person typed. Variance is imported minus actual, and an open drawer's counted figure is blank rather than zero, because a drawer still trading has not disagreed with anything yet.

The cash trail starts at the drawer

Cash office is downstream of the till and the rota. Because all three are the same platform, nothing has to be re-keyed between them.

EPOS & Till

Sealed Z-reads fill the cash-up's imported column, drawer sessions show as sealed or still trading, and a declared safe drop posts itself to the ledger.

ZynHR & Rotas

Labour on the cash-up sheet auto-fills from clock data rather than being estimated, so the day's cost sits next to the day's takings.

Stock & Back Office

Purchase orders, goods receipts and stock valuations run on the same sites, so cost of sales and cash movement are two views of one week.

Pricing. Finance (cash office and banking) and Cash-up are both in Professional at £149 per site per month, along with everything in Core plus ZynHR, Training and Review Management. Unlimited users on every site, annual billing gives you two months free, and ten or more sites takes 15% off automatically. See the full pricing page.

Cash management questions

What does an append-only ledger actually mean for a correction?

It means you correct a balance by writing an adjustment rather than by changing what was written. There is no edit and no delete on a ledger row, even for a super admin, and only two things can ever change: whether the bank credited it and the note attached to it. No balance is stored anywhere either, so every total on screen is derived by summing the ledger. That is what makes the history worth reading back in six months.

Does it connect to my bank?

No, and we would rather say so than imply one. Banking is recorded as a ledger row with the reference from your deposit slip or envelope, and you mark it credited later with the date and amount when the money lands. That is a manual mark: there is no bank feed and no statement import anywhere in the module. The banked amount is never changed afterwards, because a difference between what you sent and what cleared is a variance to chase, not a correction to make.

Can a safe drop from the till post itself?

Yes, where you run ZynthioEPOS. A safe drop declared on the till posts itself when the drawer is sealed, provided the Finance module is enabled for your organisation, auto-posting is on for the site, the site has exactly one active safe, and it has not already been posted. It is written inside the seal transaction and is idempotent against a re-seal, so it cannot double up, and the resulting row is indistinguishable from one somebody typed.

How do variances get flagged?

By tolerance, at the moment the entry is saved. Safe and till counts default to a five pound tolerance and banking defaults to zero. An entry over tolerance cannot be saved without a written reason, and it notifies the job titles you configure, in-app, by push and by email, with finance and director as the defaults. There is no scheduled sweep: every Finance alert fires when somebody saves the entry that caused it.

Who can move money in the system?

Three tiers. Anyone with the module can read the ledger for the sites they are allocated to. Writing a drop, a count, a banking, a paid in or out, an adjustment or a credit is open to org admins plus the finance, general manager, director, ops manager and area manager job titles. Settings and creating or deleting safes and floats are org admin only. Assistant managers and payroll are deliberately excluded, and no site allocation means no rows at all.

Related guides

Practical guides from the Zynthio team on this part of running a venue.

Till reconciliation: where the cash actually goes missing

Till reconciliation is the daily check that turns a vague cash shortfall into a specific, traceable problem a manager can actually investigate and fix.

More operator guides on the Zynthio blog. How we write them: editorial policy.

One login, one bill, one set of sites

Every Zynthio module shares the same sites, the same people and the same reporting. Turn on what you need.

Martyn’s Law Readiness

Procedure templates, a per-site capacity and tier view, a quarterly drill record and a staff briefing.

Zero-Hours Readiness

Guaranteed hours, shift notice and cancellation payment policies, plus the rota record that evidences them.

Food Safety & HACCP

Digital daily checks, temperature logs, HACCP plans, allergen charts and EHO-ready PDF records.

Rotas, Clock-In & HR

Build rotas against a live labour budget, clock staff in with geofencing, approve timesheets.

Stock & Cashing Up

Stocktakes, purchase orders, delivery scanning, GP tracking and daily cashups with weekly rollups.

Connect your existing till for live sales into stock and rotas, plus the ZynthioEPOS till in build.

HACCP Plans

Build a full Codex HACCP plan online, link CCPs to daily checks and export EHO-ready PDFs.

COSHH & Risk Assessments

Substance register with data sheets and PPE, plus scored venue risk assessments with sign-off.

Audits & Mock EHO

Ten UK templates, 400+ inspector-style questions, weighted scoring and a site league table.

Staff Training

Assign courses, track completion by person and site, and issue certificates into the HR file.

Review Management

Google, TripAdvisor and your FSA rating in one dashboard with a reputation score per site.

Table Bookings

Website booking widget, live service diary, deposits and a guest CRM - no per-cover fees, ever.

Refusals Register

A digital refusals book filled from the till, ready for the licensing officer.

Accounting Export

The daily sales journal, supplier bills and payroll journal in Xero’s own import layouts.

KPIs & Reporting

Clock-in accuracy, labour budget, salary utilisation and reputation, per site and per group.

Recipe Costing

Cost dishes from live stock prices, track GP ex-VAT and tag all 14 UK allergens.

Free GP Calculator

Cost a dish, cost a keg by the pint, or price to a target GP. No account needed, VAT handled properly.

Or start at the beginning on the Zynthio homepage, try it with sample data on the live demo, or read practical operator guides on the blog.

Know where the cash is, today

Start a 14-day free trial with no card, or book a call and we will walk through safes, tolerances and who should be allowed to write.