The Float You Start The Night With
Three people, three answers about what the float is. Why an uncertain starting number makes every closing number uncertain, how much change a busy Saturday actually needs, and the five rules that end float arguments.
Ask the manager what the float is. Ask the bar supervisor. Ask the person who opened the till. If you get three answers, then every variance calculation in the venue has been built on a guess, and nobody knows it.
The float is the least interesting thing in a venue and one of the most expensive to get wrong, because it is the baseline every other cash number is measured against.
An uncertain start makes every end uncertain
Float believed to be 200
Float actually 150 (someone took 50 for change last week)
Takings counted at close: 1,340
Variance reported: +50 ← entirely fictional
⚠️ The variance is not a measurement if the baseline is a belief. Every minute spent investigating it is wasted, and worse, a real shortfall of the same size would be invisible.
⇒ The Cash-Up That Takes An Hour
The five rules
One: the float is counted and signed at open
By the person who will be held to it, not by the person handing it over. Thirty seconds.
⭕ A signature turns "I think it was right" into a fact somebody stands behind.
Two: the float is a fixed number, written where people can see it
Not remembered. Not "about two hundred." A specific number, posted.
⇒ The Board In The Dressing Room
Three: any movement between tills is written down at the moment
02:05 50 from till 2 to till 3 — ran out of fives
⚠️ Without the line, two tills are now wrong and each person believes the other is at fault.
Four: the float never funds anything
Not a taxi, not a delivery, not a staff sub, not petty cash. The moment it does, it stops being a baseline.
⭕ If those things need funding, they need their own money and their own record.
Five: the float is reviewed when trade changes, not never
A float set when the venue was quieter runs out of change on the new busiest night, every week, forever, because nobody owns the number.
How much change a busy night actually needs
Most floats are set once and never revisited. A rough way to sanity-check yours:
Cash proportion of takings (%) × expected takings
÷ average cash transaction
= number of cash transactions
Then ask how many of those need change, and in what denominations. The answer usually shows two things:
- The total is roughly right
- The mix is wrong — too many notes, not enough coin and small notes
⚠️ Running out of fives at midnight is not a float-size problem. It is a float-mix problem, and adding more money does not fix it.
The Saturday test
For two Saturdays, note the time anyone has to go looking for change. If it is the same hour both weeks, the mix is wrong at that hour and you can fix it with the same money, differently arranged.
What actually goes wrong
The float that drifts
Nobody takes anything deliberately. Small roundings, a fiver borrowed and repaid in coin, a night where the count was rushed. Over months the number moves.
⭕ Counting at open catches drift within a day instead of within a quarter.
The float that gets raided at the busy hour
The bar runs out of change at midnight and takes from another till. Both tills are now wrong, and the person who did it went home at two.
⇒ This is rule three, and it is the single most common cause of an unexplainable variance.
The float nobody owns
If the float belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody. One named person per till per shift.
⇒ Your Busiest Person Is A Single Point Of Failure
The float used as petty cash
A delivery arrives and needs paying. Someone takes it from the till. The record, if it exists at all, is a scrap of paper.
⚠️ This is rule four, and it is also where cash handling starts to become an accounting problem rather than an operational one.
⚠️ The accounting side is not ours to rule on
How cash movements must be recorded, what documentation a payment out of a till requires, and how this interacts with your books and tax obligations are questions for your accountant. This page covers only the operational habits. Take the recording requirements to a qualified accountant before designing anything around them.
Setting the float properly, once
Step one: count what is actually there
Not what it should be. What it is, tonight, in every till and in the safe.
Step two: decide the number and the mix
Total per till
Breakdown by denomination
Who signs for it
Where the number is posted
Step three: run it for two weeks and look at the variance pattern
Variance now small and random — the baseline is real
Variance still one-directional — something structural remains
Step four: put a review date on it
A date, in a diary, when someone looks at whether the number and mix still fit the trade.
⚠️ Without a date, "review when trade changes" means never, because nobody notices trade changing.
⇒ Your Crowd Changed Three Months Ago
What this looks like when it is working
The three-people test
Ask three people what the float is. One answer is the pass condition.
The change test
Count how many times in a night someone goes looking for change. Zero or one is fine. Four means the mix is wrong.
The variance test
Working — variances are small and change direction
Not working — variances are small and always the same direction
⚠️ A consistently-directional small variance is the most ignored signal in venue cash handling, because each individual night looks fine.
The safe, and who can open it
The float lives somewhere between the safe and the till, and that journey is where most unexplained differences begin.
Who has access
Everyone who has ever been given the code — including people who left
⚠️ Most venues cannot list who currently knows the combination. That is not a security problem so much as a record problem: with everybody able to open it, nobody is accountable for it.
⭕ A named list, checked when anybody leaves.
⇒ Your Busiest Person Is A Single Point Of Failure
Two people, or a record
Either two people are present when the safe is opened, or one person opens it and writes a line. Both work. Neither happening is the problem.
The drop nobody logged
Cash moved from a till to the safe mid-shift, for safety
⭕ Correct instinct, and it makes the till short by exactly that amount unless a line is written.
Change, and where it comes from
The two-hour gap
Most venues get change from a bank, and banks are not open when the venue needs change.
The decision to get change is made in daylight
The need appears at midnight
⚠️ A float problem discovered at 22:00 cannot be solved that night, which is why the mix matters more than the total.
Buying change from the guests
Asking a card-paying guest to pay cash for small notes
⇒ It works occasionally and it is not a system. If it happens more than once a night, the float is wrong.
The coin nobody wants
Some denominations accumulate and never leave. If the safe is full of one coin, the pricing is producing it — that is a menu observation, not a float one.
⇒ The Price You Have Not Changed
What a float review looks like
Twenty minutes, twice a year.
One: is the total still right
Count the times change ran out in the last month
Two: is the mix still right
Which denomination ran out, and at what hour
Three: has the trade changed
⇒ Your Crowd Changed Three Months Ago
⚠️ Card share rising means the float can usually shrink, and most venues never revisit it downward.
Three to hold
1 Counted and signed at open, by the person held to it
2 Movements between tills written at the moment, not remembered
3 The float funds nothing — not taxis, not deliveries, not subs
Where the record has to sit
The float count, the movements, and the closing variance belong in the same record, because the only useful question — why was this night different — needs all three at once.
⇒ The Month End That Takes Two Weeks
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