Hey, restaurant owners. Today, I want to teach you how to properly handle the cash
in your restaurant, so you can eliminate mistakes make,
more money, and possibly prevent theft if there is any going
on in your restaurant.
Hello, my name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm an author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
and I'm the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
as well as RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com.
And as I said earlier, today, I want to teach you how to properly handle
the cash in your restaurant. When it comes to handling cash,
there's really a lot of things that stay the same no matter what
kind of restaurant you have, and only one variable.
If you have servers in your restaurant,
then chances are they're going to carry their own
bank and they're going to need somewhere to make change for that bank,
but if you have cash registers, a cashiers,
counter service,
or bartenders that have a register,
the rest of the procedures are all exactly the same for you.
So, first, let's address for those of you who have cashier or have
servers who are going to make their own bank.
Now, you can't force your servers,
at least in the United States to bring in a certain amount of money,
that's not their responsibility.
You can encourage it, and I would generally encourage my servers to bring in
about a hundred dollars in various amounts of change,
you know just coming in with a hundred-dollar bill isn't going to work.
They should have quarters, nickels, dimes, singles, fives, tens,
twenties,you know whatever works for you, but again, I would encourage this.
You can't require it, you could encourage it,
and I would also encourage them
like I said to make sure that they have different varieties of change.
Now, should their first order of the day
or if they didn't come in with enough change be some strange amount?
Like, let's say, a ten-dollar check and someone paid with $100,
they might not have the right change for that. So, that's where
you would need a bank of some sort.
Now, I would always train my servers to go to other servers
to try to make change first, if there wasn't another server or if another server
couldn't make the change if you don't have a cash register set up,
then this is when they would go to a manager to get change.
Now from here on out, the rest these procedures are identical
no matter how your restaurant is set up,
whether your servers carry their own bank, whether the cashiers are not.
So, the first thing that you need to know is that you should have at least
500 dollars in your safe in your main bank in the restaurant.
Now, I would always have $1,000 in that bank because I never wanted
to deal with running out of money,
going to a bank, or being embarrassed than not having the right amount of change.
Now that would always vary between hundreds,
and twenties and fives and quarters and everything else,
but I never wanted to run out of money.
So, I always had $1,000 in that bank.
Now that money will drop usually throughout the week, but for me,
twice a week, I would refill that when I went to the bank.
You may refill that once a week, you may refill that three times a week,
that's totally up to you, but the most important part here is that it
always gets reset to the exact same amount of money.
I never like to just get money and have random amounts because that's where theft,
that's where mistakes, that's where problems can occur.
When it comes to cash handling, systems and consistency
is most important.
Now, I want to quickly show you a form that I use
for that petty cash or for that safe bank to make sure that it's the same
or to make sure that it's consistent throughout and you can find mistakes if there are any mistakes.
So quickly as you can see on this safe log, we have a date, a time,
a transaction description, withdrawals, deposits, balance,
and then initials from the employee whoever's filling this out.
So every week, I would print out a new form for all of my restaurants
and we would enter the starting balance with their initials, the date and time,
and then any time money goes in or out of the safe
no matter what,
it gets entered here, even if it's just to make change, it gets entered here. How much came out,
the time, what our new balance is,and how much comes in
and what the new balance is. And so this way,
I was able to go to all of my restaurants and audit
their safe at any point in time and make sure they had the exact
amount of money that they were supposed to have in their safe.
The next thing when we talk about proper cash handling
is how do you set up your cash registers.
Some of you are going to have multiple cash registers,
some of you are going to have one cash register in a bar, usually.
Some of you might have multiple drawers in one POS system for different people.
It's totally up to you. I only suggest that you have one drawer
per person because then you can hold that person a little more accountable
and find out if there is theft or if the mistakes are happening on their shift.
Otherwise, sometimes you might have two or three bartenders in one drawer
and that's okay.
The only challenge there is that you can't really hold
one bartender or one cashier responsible if multiple people are going into a drawer.
So, that's a decision you're going to have to make based on
how much you care about this, how much time you have in your hands,
and what your POS system or cash registers capabilities are,
but again, when it comes to this, I always set my drawers to the exact same amount.
I always set my drawers to $300.
I see a lot of times with my client’s restaurants that their drawers will change every day.
They just kind of set it with whatever they have. That didn't work for me.
I always set my drawer to $300 at the end of a shift
and then it gets rechecked in the morning.
Now, we covered a lot here, but there's a lot more to cover.
I have a lot more forms and a lot more procedures for you.
In the next video in part 2 of this how to handle the cash in your restaurant video
that I'm going to release next week,
I want to show you exactly how I set up those drawers,
how I closed out those drawers, how I build my deposits on a daily basis,
how I get changed,
and then how I transfer all of those overages and unders,
overages and unders, the cash short and over…
excuse me into my accounting software.
This has been Ryan Gromfin with TheRestaurantBoss.com,
and RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com.
I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, there'll be a little blue button
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usually within 24 hours on this.
Have an absolute wonderful day.
And don't forget to check out part 2
in this how to handle the cash in your restaurant video series.
Thank you.