Many businesses may need to create daily sales journal entries to account for their sales properly.
Businesses that use a cash register system, also known as a point of sale (P.O.S.), often have to record sales through a daily sales summary.
Common situations that may require recording daily sales are bookkeeping for restaurants and retail shops.
Identify what you need
It is important to identify what you need from your daily sales summary.
One important thing to identify is the level of detail you need your sales broken down into.
- What sales category details do you need to have meaningful financial reports?
- Will you track returns and/or discounts?
- Do you sell gift cards? If so, you need to track both the sales and redemptions of gift cards.
- What forms of payment do you accept? Most businesses accept cash, checks, credit cards, Venmo, PayPal, gift cards, or store credit.
- Do you receive tips? If so, is it income, or are they paid out of payroll?
Now that you have identified the items on your sales summary and how you need them broken down, it is time to program your sales system.
Program your sales system
Your sales system should be programmed to break down the sales into the level of detail you need, but it should be summarized to make entering your daily sales journal easy and efficient.
If several items need to be categorized in a specific sales category, program your P.O.S. system to generate that information.
For example, it is common to differentiate food, beverage, and gift card sales in a restaurant. Your Restaurant P.O.S. system should be programmed to summarize your sales information as needed. If it can't, you may look for a different sales system that better meets your needs.
You should also summarize your payments in the manner you need them.
With credit card batches, American Express payments may settle to your bank separately from Visa/MasterCard/Discover, which often settle together.
If true, you should have your daily sales summary create a payment line item for American Express and another for Visa/MasterCard/Discover.
Then, you may have cash and need to figure out how to tie it to your bank's deposits.
Your daily cash sales line should be booked to the QuickBooks undeposited funds account, or a clearing account since the money is not in the bank when you make the sale. Cash is either in the register or in a safe (hopefully).
Once you deposit several days' cash sales, you want to move the money from undeposited funds to the bank account and ensure your cash ties out.
When your daily sales summary report is working as you want it to, it is time to record your daily sales journal.
Record your daily sales
The best way to record your daily sales is to mirror your sales summary and bank activity. You might need to work backward until you figure out the flow.
For example, you want to check with your merchant processor to determine how your credit card sales will settle in your bank account. Will each batch settle separately daily? Will Amex settle separately from Visa/MC/Discover? How will the weekend affect credit card settlements? Once you gather the information, verify how everything hits your bank account.
Now, take this information and build a daily sales journal entry.
Take your daily sales summary and make your QuickBooks daily sales journal entry match the format.
What I mean is that you want your QuickBooks daily sales journal entry to mirror your sales summary from your P.O.S. system. I would have everything in the same order and make sure that every possible sale and payment category was included.
Once you have your sales journal entry figured out, you should use the QuickBooks memorized transaction function to memorize it.
If your journal entry is a mirror image of your sales report and every sales and payment category is listed, data entry of daily sales is simple.
There are even custom services that import data into QuickBooks.
Reconcile, reconcile, reconcile
You have recorded your daily sales. To ensure everything is accounted for properly, it would be best if you reconciled QuickBooks.
If you are recording daily sales, you need to be aware of a few things.
First, there will be a lot of deposit transactions. One tip I have found helpful is to sort your deposits by amount, as the amounts are usually unique numbers.
Secondly, yes, you have to reconcile to the penny.
Third, you may need to reference your credit card merchant statements to reconcile properly. Two days' sales are sometimes combined and deposited into your account.
For example, you may see payments for Saturday and Sunday combined and deposited into your bank account.
A night-end manager could also forget to batch for the previous night and wait until the next night, thus combining two days' worth of sales. Although this complicates the process, it does not make it impossible.
If you record a daily sales summary, you need to know what you are doing from a bookkeeping standpoint.
If you skip a step or try to take shortcuts, reconciliation will be very difficult and maybe even impossible.
Recoding daily sales complicates the bookkeeping process, but it does not make things impossible.
Unfortunately, there are only two ways to do accounting: correctly or incorrectly.
