Till for a charity, school or club fair: no accounts

Can a free till work for a one-day fair?

Yes. For a school summer fair, a charity sale or a club open day, Mini Till runs in the browser on whatever phones the volunteers already have. There is no account to create, nothing to install and nothing to pay for, and it keeps working if the field or hall has no signal. The catch is that each phone keeps its own records, so the way you set up the day depends on how many stalls you have and who is counting the money. This guide covers that, and the Gift Aid question that comes up at every fundraiser.

Set up one till per stall

The simplest arrangement is one device per stall: cakes, books, plants, refreshments. Each stall then has its own sales and its own cash, and the split of takings by stall falls out without any adding up across devices.

On one phone, open the till and add every item you sell, with its price. Keep to round prices. A fair runs on £1, £2 and £5.
Under Settings and sharing in the Products tab, create a share link. Open the link on each other phone and the same product list loads there.
Remove what a stall does not sell, so a volunteer sees six buttons instead of thirty.
Ring up two practice sales, then clear them or void them in Sales history so the test does not sit in the day's figures.

Since the till stores its data in the browser, avoid sharing one phone between stalls. Two stalls on one device would run their takings together, and there is no stall field to separate them afterwards.

Borrowed phones and volunteers

Most fairs run on borrowed phones, and that is fine for the free till because there are no accounts. A few habits make it painless.

Ask first, tell them what is stored. The product list and sales stay in that phone's browser. Say so to the owner, and tell them you will remove the data afterwards.
Keep the phone on the stall. A volunteer whose phone is the till cannot go for lunch with it. Agree handover times.
Give a five minute briefing. Tap the item, read the total, take the money, enter what they hand over, give the change. That is the whole job.
Charge and carry power. Fairs run long, and a flat phone is a stall with no till.
Use Clear sale for mistakes. Before payment, one tap clears the basket. After payment, a sale can be voided in Sales history, which marks it Voided and leaves it out of the totals.

The free till does not know who is serving. There is no sign-in for the free till, so sales are not recorded against a volunteer. If that matters, write the names of the people on the stall against the time on the cash up sheet. Recording sales per person is part of Mini Till Pro, which is built for a standing team rather than a one-off fair.

Counting the cash with two people

Two people for the count protects the volunteers as much as the charity. Nobody can be accused of an error if two people watched it being made.

Start with a counted float. Two people count it, write the figure on the cash up sheet, and both sign.
Empty the till during the day. A volunteer and a second person take out the larger notes at set times, count them, write down the amount and put them in a bag.
Count at the end, separately. Each person counts the cash alone and writes the figure down before comparing. If the two figures differ, count again together.
Subtract the float. The result is the day's cash takings for that stall.
Compare with the till. The Cash figure in Today's sales should match. Differences of a pound or two usually come from wrong change.
Seal and sign. Both people sign the bag. Keep two people together from the count to the bank, or the safe.

Card takings are the other half. If the fair has a card reader, match its day total against the Card figure on the till. Cash handling for small business owners covers the common mistakes, and it is worth reading with whoever is the treasurer.

Splitting takings by stall

When every stall has its own device, each one gives you its figure at the end of the day. Press Export CSV in Sales history on each phone, which gives you date, time, items, payment method and total for every sale, and put the files in one folder named for the fair. Add up the stalls in a spreadsheet, or just write each stall's total on the cash up sheet and add them there.

If you run the same fair every year with the same stalls, the committee may want one set of figures across all of them without collecting phones. That is what Mini Till Pro does, with a location per stall and takings reported per location. It has a 14 day free trial. For a single event it is more than you need.

Gift Aid: only if it is accurate

Gift Aid lets a charity claim back tax on a donation, but only a donation. A cake sale is a sale. The rules from GOV.UK that matter at a fair are these.

Money from selling donated goods such as clothes does not qualify. Event tickets do not qualify either, even when the price is well above the cost of the event. Source: GOV.UK, what donations charities can claim on.
A donor has to make a Gift Aid declaration for the charity to claim, and must have paid enough UK tax to cover it. Source: GOV.UK, Gift Aid.
Small cash donations of £30 or less can be claimed without declarations under the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme, subject to conditions, including that the charity has also made a Gift Aid claim in the same tax year. You need to record the total cash collected, the collection date and the date it was banked. Source: GOV.UK, small donations scheme.

What this means for the till is simple: keep donations out of it. Put them in a separate tin or bucket, counted and recorded on their own line, so sales and donations never mix. Mini Till treats every price as including VAT at 20 per cent and shows the VAT inside each sale. That figure means nothing for a donation, and probably nothing for a charity stall, so you can ignore it. Ask your treasurer whether the charity has any VAT position.

If you do not hold declarations and are not sure the small donations scheme applies, do not claim. A claim that cannot be backed up is worse than a missed one. Raffles, tombolas and lotteries have separate rules that this guide does not cover.

After the fair

Export each device's sales to CSV before anyone leaves.
Download a backup from the Products tab if you will run the same stall again.
On borrowed phones, delete the products and sales, or clear the site data in the browser settings, then tell the owner it is done.
Bank the cash the next working day, with the two signed sheets.
File the exports and the cash up sheets with the committee papers.

Questions

Do volunteers need an account?

No. The free till has no accounts or log-ins, so anyone can pick up a phone with the page open and start serving.

What if a phone dies mid-fair?

Sales stay in the phone's browser and are there when it is charged. Keep a pen and paper tally as a backup, and use the cash count as the final check.

Can we use the till for the raffle?

You could ring up raffle tickets as a product, but the rules on raffles are separate from anything here, so check them before running one.

A till for a charity, school or club fair