Shift Report vs Day Report: what each shows

On this page

1. The Shift Report: one person, one drawer
2. The Day Report: the business day added up
3. Reading them together
4. Mistakes that hide problems
5. A short morning routine

Most stores print two reports at the end of the day and file them in the same folder. They answer different questions, though, and reading them the same way is how small problems slip past. The Shift Report is about a person and a drawer. The Day Report is about the business.

Here is what each one should show you, and a short routine for reading them together.

The Shift Report: one person, one drawer

A shift runs from the moment a clerk takes over the counter to the moment they hand it off. The Shift Report is the record of that stretch. Anyone who reads it later, including you on a Monday morning, should be able to tell what happened without calling the clerk.

What belongs on it

• Who and when. The clerk’s name, the start and end time, and the starting bank in the drawer.
• Register sales. Totals by department, with fuel, lottery and inside sales kept apart. These come from the register’s own shift report, not from anyone’s memory.
• Payment types. Cash, credit, debit, EBT, checks and customer charge accounts, each on its own line.
• Cash that went out. Paid-outs for deliveries or supplies, lottery winners paid in cash, checks cashed, cash loaded into the ATM.
• Cash that came in. Loans from the safe to the drawer, payments on customer accounts, other income.
• Safe drops. Each drop with its time and amount.
• Lottery. Instant ticket sales from the bin counts, plus online sales and cashes from the lottery terminal.
• Fuel. Gallons and dollars by grade, drive-offs, and tank readings if you take them at shift change.
• Exceptions. Voids, refunds, no-sales and price overrides.
• The count and the over/short. What the clerk counted, what the register says should be there, and the difference.
• Notes. A broken scanner, a customer dispute, a delivery that came in short.

The Shift Report is where mistakes get fixed. If a paid-out was entered as $50 and the receipt says $5, the correction belongs on that shift, with a note saying who changed it and why.

The Day Report: the business day added up

The Day Report is the sum of every shift in the business day. It should not have numbers of its own. If the day is wrong, one of its shifts is wrong, and that is where the fix goes.

That rule sounds strict, but it saves you later. When the day equals its shifts, you can always trace a number back to a person and a time. When someone adjusts the day directly, the trail breaks, and a month later nobody remembers why that Tuesday doesn’t add up.

What belongs on it

• Total sales by department for the whole day
• Fuel gallons by grade, and fuel margin if you track cost
• Lottery sales, cashes and what you owe the lottery for the day
• Sales tax collected
• Cash, card and other tender totals, which your bookkeeper matches to the bank
• Total safe drops and the bank deposit made from them
• Paid-outs and purchases recorded that day
• The day’s over/short, with each shift’s figure shown underneath

Where the business day ends

A business day ends when the register closes its day, and that isn’t always midnight. A store open around the clock might close the register’s day early in the morning, after the overnight rush, or whenever the overnight clerk gets to it. Pick one time, write it down and stick to it. A day that closes at a different hour every night makes comparisons between days useless, because each one covers a different stretch of hours.

Reading them together

Most questions point clearly to one report or the other.

What you want to know	Start with
Who was short on Tuesday night	Shift Report
How much fuel you sold on Saturday	Day Report
Whether the deposit matched the drops	Day Report, then each shift behind it
Why voids went up this week	Shift Reports, clerk by clerk
What you owe in sales tax for the month	Day Reports for the month
Whether lottery counts are off	Shift Reports, since counts happen at each change

The Day Report tells you something happened. The Shift Report tells you where.

Mistakes that hide problems

A day that balances while its shifts don’t

For example, say the morning shift is $35 over and the evening shift is $35 short. The day shows zero, and it’s tempting to move on. That’s two problems. The morning clerk may have shortchanged a customer or taken cash for a sale without ringing it. The evening clerk may have handed out too much change, or worse. Look at every shift’s over/short as well as the day’s.

Editing the day to make it balance

If the deposit is off and someone types an adjustment into the day’s totals, the shifts and the day stop agreeing. Find the shift with the error and correct it there.

Mixing register numbers with typed numbers

Sales, tax and tender totals should come straight from the register’s report. Counts, drops, paid-outs and notes come from the clerk. Keep the two visibly separate. When a clerk retypes register totals by hand, typos turn into phantom shortages.

Leaving a shift open

A clerk who forgets to close their shift before the next person starts leaves two people’s sales on one record. Neither of them can be held to that count. Make closing the shift part of the handover, every time, with both people present.

A short morning routine

1. Open yesterday’s Day Report. Compare total sales with a normal day for that weekday. A big gap usually has an obvious cause, like weather, a road closure or a register problem.
2. Check the day’s over/short, then open each Shift Report and check theirs.
3. Scan voids, refunds and no-sales on each shift, looking for anything unusual for that clerk.
4. Match the total safe drops to the deposit going to the bank.
5. Check the lottery and fuel lines for anything odd, such as a shift with no instant ticket sales at all.
6. Write down anything you need to ask about, and ask the clerk while they still remember the shift.

Do it at the same time every day. After a couple of weeks you’ll know what normal looks like for each clerk and each shift, and the odd ones will stand out on their own.

In Advantage, each shift closed at the store becomes a Shift Report, and the Day Report adds up that day’s closed shifts. Both are on the website and the phone app, and both can be e-mailed as PDFs to the people on the store’s list.