The instructions below are generic, because the sequence is the same on every EPOS system worth using. Where Mini Till does something specific, or deliberately does not do something at all, it is called out. To follow along, the till is free, needs no account and opens in a browser tab.
Step one: build the product list
Everything else depends on this. A till with a good product list is faster than a cash register; a till with a bad one is slower, which is why people abandon them in the first week.
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Write down every line you sell, with its price
On paper first, before you touch the screen. Include the things you sell twice a week, not just the obvious ones, or you will be improvising mid-queue.
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Name each one so it is recognisable at a glance
Short and specific. "Latte lg" beats "Large Latte Coffee Hot Drink". Put the size in the name rather than building a separate size system.
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Order them by how often you sell them
The five things that make most of your money go first, where a thumb lands without looking. This is the single biggest speed gain available to you, and it costs nothing.
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Group the rest into a handful of categories
Four to eight is right for most counters. More than that and you are hunting through tabs instead of tapping.
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Decide how prices carry tax
Most UK counter businesses display VAT-inclusive prices, so the till should show the VAT already contained in the price rather than adding it on top. Mini Till treats prices as inclusive at 20%.
In Mini Till this all lives under the Products tab, where you can also import a list from CSV with the columns name,price,category if you have one in a spreadsheet already. The category column is optional, and takes food, drink, retail or other.
Step two: ring up your first sale
Do this several times before a customer is standing in front of you. The pattern is universal:
- Tap a product. It appears in the current sale with a quantity of one.
- Tap it again for a second, or adjust the quantity directly.
- Keep going until the basket matches what the customer is holding.
- Read the running total out loud as you go. It stops disputes before they start.
- Apply a discount if one is due. Percentage discounts suit a staff rate, fixed amounts suit a haggle at a market.
- Move to the payment step, which in Mini Till is Review order then Take payment.
Practise until you can do a three-item sale without looking for anything, then clear the practice data so your first real day starts from zero.
Step three: cash, card or split
Recording the payment method correctly is not admin. It is the thing that makes the end of the day possible, because you cannot check a drawer against a total that lumps card and cash together.
Cash
Select cash, then enter what the customer actually handed you. The till works out the change. This is worth doing properly even when the maths is easy: a recorded tender amount is the difference between a drawer you can reconcile and a drawer you can only guess at. Mini Till offers an Exact button and quick +£5, +£10 and +£20 buttons, because those cover most of what people hand over.
Then, in this order: leave the customer's note visible on top of the drawer, count the change back out loud, and only then put the note away. Two seconds, and the "I gave you a twenty" argument disappears.
Card
Here is the part that trips people up, and it is worth being precise about. Your till and your card reader are two different things. On some systems they are joined up, so the till pushes the amount to the terminal. On others, including Mini Till, they are not: you key the amount into the reader yourself, take the payment there, and then record the sale on the till as a card sale.
Mini Till does not process payments. It records that a sale was paid by card. The money moves through your card reader and your payments provider, whoever that is. Nothing about your card rate changes because of which till you use.
The practical consequence: always take the card payment first and confirm it has been approved, then record it on the till. Doing it the other way round leaves you with a recorded sale and a declined card.
Split payments
Someone pays part in cash and the rest on card, usually to empty their pockets of shrapnel. Take the cash portion first, count it, then put the remainder through the reader. Record the sale as split so that neither the cash total nor the card total ends up wrong at cash-up.
Receipts
Most counter customers never ask, and in the UK you only have to provide one on request unless you are VAT-registered and the customer wants a VAT invoice. When somebody does ask, find the sale in Sales history and use the Receipt button: Mini Till lays the sale out as a receipt with your business name, the items, the total, the VAT contained in it and how it was paid, then hands it to your browser's print dialogue. Set the business name once under settings first, or the receipt goes out headed simply "Receipt".
Step four: mistakes and refunds
Before the sale is completed
Easy. Remove the wrong line, or clear the whole basket and start again. Do it without apologising and the queue will not notice.
After the sale is completed
This is where systems genuinely differ, and where you should know what yours does before it happens.
A full EPOS tied to your payments provider can issue a refund against the original transaction: the money goes back to the same card, and both the till record and the payment record are corrected together. That is the cleanest outcome, and it is a reason to use your payment provider's own till software if returns are a regular part of your trade.
Mini Till cannot do this. Completed sales are not editable individually, and there is no refund button. It is a deliberately simple, honest record of what was rung up. If you need to refund a customer, the process is:
- Refund the money itself, through your card reader's own refund function or out of the cash tin.
- Write the refund down on your cash-up sheet with the amount, the reason and the time.
- Adjust the day's takings by hand when you reconcile, using that note.
That is workable at a stall with occasional refunds and genuinely irritating in a shop with a returns policy. If returns are routine for you, this is the point at which a free browser till is the wrong tool, and the buyer's guide covers what to move to.
Step five: cashing up
Cashing up is one subtraction and one comparison. Do it every single trading day, including the quiet ones, because the habit is what catches problems while they are still small.
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Count the drawer
Notes and coins, somewhere the public cannot see you. Write the figure down before you look at anything else, so you are not unconsciously counting towards the answer you expect.
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Subtract the opening float
The float you counted in at the start, typically £50 to £150 depending on your prices. What is left is your cash taken.
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Compare it against the till's cash figure
Mini Till shows today's takings split by card, cash and split payments. The cash figure is what you are comparing against, adjusted for any refunds you noted.
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Record the variance, whatever it is
Over or short, write the number down. A few pence either way is ordinary. What you are looking for is a pattern, and you can only see a pattern if you logged the days that looked fine.
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Set tomorrow's float aside and secure the rest
Bank it, or lock it away. Never leave the float in an unattended till overnight.
Step six: reconciling card and closing the day
Cash is only half of it. Your card reader keeps its own total for the day, usually as a batch or settlement report in its app. Compare that figure against the till's card total.
When the two disagree, the cause is nearly always one of four things: a card sale that was taken on the reader but never recorded on the till, a sale recorded as cash when it was paid by card, a refund processed on the reader and not noted, or a split payment recorded as a single method. Checking in that order finds it within a minute or two.
Two more things before you close up:
- Export the day. A CSV of your sales history is your digital record, and it is what feeds accounting software for Making Tax Digital. Mini Till exports the full history from the Sales history section in one tap.
- Back it up. If your till stores data in the browser rather than on a server, that data is exactly as durable as your browser profile. Mini Till writes the lot to one small file from Backup & restore, and restores from the same file on any device. This is the one piece of housekeeping people skip and then very much regret.
The record-keeping rules behind all of this, including how long HMRC expects you to keep things and where Making Tax Digital fits, are set out in the EPOS guide.
A first-week routine
Count the float in before you serve anybody. Ring up everything, including the coffee you gave away, because an unrecorded sale is a variance you will hunt for later. Cash up and reconcile card daily rather than weekly, export and back up on Sunday night, and once a week look at what actually sold. That last habit is the whole reason for having a till rather than a tin.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Not recording payment method properly. Everything downstream depends on it, and it takes no extra time to get right.
- Skipping cash-up on quiet days. The gap is exactly where an error hides.
- Recording the card sale before the terminal approves it. Confirm, then record.
- Never taking a backup. Browser data is not a backup of itself.
- A product list nobody maintains. Prices drift, new lines get rung up as "misc", and within a month your reports are fiction.
If you are still choosing a system rather than learning one, the buyer's guide prices the options, and trading from a stall or a van covers what changes when there is no signal and no mains power.