Many businesses may find it necessary to create a daily sales journal entry in order to properly account for their sales. Businesses that use some sort of cash register system will 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. Watch this QuickBooks video demonstration on how to develop and record a daily sales journal entry.
It is important to identify what you need from your daily sales summary. One important thing to identify is the level of detail that you need your sales broken down into. What categories do you need sales detailed out into in order to have meaningful financial reports? Do you sell gift cards? If so you will need to track both the sales and redemptions of gift cards. What forms of payment do you accept? Most businesses accept some or all of the following forms of payment: cash, check and credit cards. If you accept credit cards, what types of credit cards do you accept? Now that you have identified the items on your sales summary and how you need it broken down, it is time to program your sales system.
Your sales system should be programmed to break down the sales into the level of detail that you need, but it should be summarized to make entering your daily sales journal easy and efficient. If several different items need to be categorized in a certain sales category then program your P.O.S. system to spit out that information. As an example, in a restaurant it is common to differentiate food, beverage and gift cards sales. Your Restaurant P.O.S. system should be programmed to summarize your sales information in the manner you need. If your P.O.S. system can't be programmed to summarize sales into the manner you need, then may want to look into a different P.O.S 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 typically settle to your bank separately from Visa/MasterCard/Discover, which often settle together. If this is true you should have your daily sales summary create a payment line item for American Express and another for Visa/MC/Discover. Then you may have cash and you need to figure out a way to tie out cash and deposit it into your bank. Your daily sales line for cash should be booked to the QuickBooks undeposited funds 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' worth of cash sales you want to move the money from undeposited funds to the bank account and make sure your cash ties out. Once you have your daily sales summary report working the way you want it to it is time to record your daily sales journal.
The best way to record your daily sales is to mirror your sales summary and bank activity. You might need to work backwards until you figure out the flow of things. For example, you want to check with your merchant processor to figure out how your credit card sales will settle in your bank account. Will each batch settle separately on a daily basis? 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 you want your QuickBooks daily sales journal entry to be a mirror image of your sales summary from your P.O.S. system. I would have the order of everything be exactly the same and I would 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 the sales journal. If your journal entry is a mirror image of your sales report and every sales and payment category is listed it makes data entry of the daily sales a simple process. There are even custom services that import data into QuickBooks.
Now that you have recorded you daily sales you need to reconcile QuickBooks to make sure that everything is accounted for properly. If you are recording daily sales you need to be aware of a few things. First, there is going to be a lot of deposit transactions. One tip I have found helpful is to sort your deposits by amount, as the amounts are usually a unique number. Secondly, yes you have to reconcile to the penny. Third, you may need to reference your credit card merchant statements in order to reconcile properly. The reason is that sometimes two day's sales are combined and then deposited into your account. This is very common for American Express payments over the weekend. You will often find that the American Express payments for Saturday and Sunday are combined together and then 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 find yourself having to record a daily sales summary then you need to know exactly what you are doing from a bookkeeping standpoint. If you skip a step of the process or try and take short cuts you will find reconciliation to be very difficult and maybe even impossible. Recoding daily sales does complicate the bookkeeping process, but does not make things impossible. Unfortunately there is only two ways to do accounting; correctly or incorrectly.