Employees and attendance
Employees holds your staff records. Attendance records who worked when, which feeds payroll and answers questions about who was on the till at a given time.
Expenses
Expenses records money going out that is not stock - rent, utilities, wages, repairs. Record them as they happen.
This is what makes the difference between knowing your sales and knowing your profit. A shop that records every sale and no expenses has a revenue figure and no idea whether it is making money.
Banks and payouts
Banks holds your accounts, and payouts records money moving out of the business. Keeping these current is what lets cash flow reporting mean anything.
The accounting section
Behind the till sits a real set of books: chart of accounts, journal, ledger, and the statements - trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow.
You do not have to touch these to run a shop. Sales, purchases and expenses post to them for you. They are there when you need to answer a question the shop reports cannot - what the business is worth, what it owes, whether this month's profit is real.
Two checks worth doing monthly:
- Does the trial balance balance? If not, something needs looking at before the figures are used.
- Does the balance sheet match reality? Compare its bank figure with your actual bank balance.
Opening balances
If you moved from another system, Opening balances is where you tell POS Cloud what was already true - stock on hand, money in the bank, what customers owed you. Do it before trading, or the books will only ever describe what has happened since you started, which is not what the business is worth.