Money’s going missing. Find the hole, not a culprit.

Where money actually goes

Before anything else, it helps to know the usual ways money leaves a food business without a sale. In rough order of how often they happen:

1. Sales that were never recorded. A plate went out in the rush and nobody wrote it down or rang it up.
2. Wrong change. A ₵50 taken for a ₵20, in the dark, with a queue.
3. Money paid out and not written down. The gas, the tomatoes, a small advance.
4. MoMo that never came. A screenshot, a fake alert, a transfer to the wrong number.
5. Food and drink given away. To friends, to family, to staff, with nobody writing it down.
6. Stock that walks out. Drinks, meat, whole bags of rice.
7. Somebody taking money. It happens. It’s rarely the first explanation.

Most of these aren’t theft. All of them look exactly like theft in a drawer that’s short. That’s why a short drawer on its own tells you so little.

The six habits that close the holes

1. A name on every sale. When four people share one till, nobody can be cleared, so everybody is suspected. Give each person their own sign-in. On Pro, Tabworthy gives each person a PIN, and every sale remembers who rang it up; staff and PINs shows how. It protects the honest people most.

2. Count every shift, not every week. A weekly count finds a shortfall after everybody has forgotten the week. Count at the end of each shift, against what the drawer should hold, with the person who had it. Counting the drawer has a sheet; closing up has the till do the sum.

3. Write down every cedi that leaves for a reason. The gas, the market run, the advance. Amount and reason, at the time. Unwritten, each one reads as a shortfall at closing and becomes an accusation.

4. Take MoMo in a way that can’t be faked. A prompt the customer approves, with the sale closing only when the money arrives, removes screenshots and fake alerts completely. Fake MoMo alerts goes through it.

5. Write off what’s given away and broken. The round on the house, the bottle that smashed, the staff meal. Written off, it stops being missing. On Pro, stock takes write-offs, and what’s still unexplained after that is the real number.

6. Keep your money and the drawer’s money apart. An owner who takes from the drawer “and puts it back later” makes every count meaningless, and teaches everybody else that it’s normal.

Reading the numbers

Once those habits are in place, the numbers start to mean something:

• One short night: noise. Note it and move on.
• Short every night by a little: usually change, or small sales not recorded. Look at the rush hours.
• Short by round numbers: usually a note. Payouts not written, or MoMo rung as cash.
• The same drawer short on the same shifts, week after week, with the dull explanations ruled out: that’s a pattern, and a pattern is worth a conversation.

Having the conversation

When you do talk to somebody, talk about the numbers, not the person. “The drawer has been ₵50 short on the last three Friday nights. Help me understand it.” Give them the chance to explain; the explanation is often real. If the pattern continues after the process is fixed, you’ll know, and so will they.

What you want to avoid is the accusation without a pattern. It rarely finds the money, and it always costs you the person, sometimes the honest one.

What a till can and can’t do

Tabworthy shows you who did what: who rang up each sale, who took the money, whose drawer was short. It doesn’t watch for patterns or flag anybody, and it can’t see a plate that went out without being rung up. The judgement stays yours. The till’s job is to make sure that when you use it, you’re using real numbers.