Z-tape woes, help me simplify!

August 17, 2007 6:40 AM

Help me simplify my cash register reporting!

This might be long.

I've got this cash register. I like it.

Here is my daily Z tape reconciliation excel sheet: here

Here's the situation. The register can download directly to quickbooks, which I tried, and it's a pain in the butt. It is NOT done in a particularly helpful well. With the client tool, you can VIEW items in tables that look like excel spreadsheets, but you CANNOT import them to excel. (Grr.) I'm working on getting another card reader night now...but I don't think it's going to let me do it one way or the other.

I would like to simplify my Z as much as possible for daily reporting. We WILL be keeping the printouts for 18 months, so they will be accessible if I need to backtrack.

Right now I process the cash in house, email the spreadsheet to my boss who does his quickbooks thing, then I bring him the deposit and it goes in the bank. Soon I'll be doing the actual depositing, but for right now this is the way it is.

So...who's up for the task? Help me simplify! I've also got the drawer start/end sheets from the cashiers for the day which also get saved for 18 months, and I've got the daily batch reports from the CC machine.

For the record:
We're an NPO hardware store, averaging between $300 and $3000 in sales per day. All departments get hits, just not every day. Any more questions, email me or post 'em here.

Thanks in advance!!

Add on: is there a website to do it online? I'd <3 to have another backup, although I guess 3 is enough. Any and all advice is welcome!

posted by TomMelee to computers & internet (2 answers total)

How is the QB import a pain? Can you elaborate? I think getting it into QB is the ideal, here.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 9:27 AM on August 17, 2007

It imports the entire Z strip as one invoice item to one client. (Talking QB 2006 Retail version).

The way I had to do it was create one customer called
"Store Customer" and have it put every department as an item per day...which would be good, BUT...

QB doesn't know what to do with %1 and %2, which are discount codes, -, which is a refund code, or voids. Also, because QB does its own tax work, it compounds tax (yes, I could make QB not do tax, but that eliminates a key reason to use QB) by configuring percent based on everything in the sale code.

The tutorial discusses one of the demo accounts where someone uses QB to keep track of cumulative sales versus individual sales, which is likely what I need to figure out to make this work, but it wasn't all together intuitive.

Make that more complicated by the fact that our books are kept in the main office---and for GAAP purposes we need 1 set of books, not two, so really doing it in QB doesn't REALLY help, because the Office Manager still has to put it into their QB. :)
posted by TomMelee at 12:41 PM on August 17, 2007