Cash drawer sessions track cash in and out of the register during a shift, so you can count the drawer at close and see exactly what the variance is. You'll find it from the Operations hub or Cmd+K — it's deliberately not a top-level sidebar item, the same as Time clock, Staff, and Financials.
Opening a drawer
Click "Open drawer," enter a starting cash float, and optionally leave notes. If no drawer at your shop has ever been given a name, you'll just get an optional "Drawer name" field (leave it blank and it's labeled "Default drawer" everywhere). As soon as any drawer has been named — even just once — the dialog switches to a picker of known drawer names pulled from recent session history, with a "+ New drawer…" option — there's no dedicated drawers table, so a drawer is really just a free-text label attached to sessions.
You can't have two OPEN sessions for the same drawer at once — the server rejects a second "open" with a conflict error, and it's protected against a double-click or dropped-request retry opening two sessions at the same instant.
Logging events during the shift
While a session is open, its card shows a live running total ("Expected in drawer") and an event log. "Log event" lets you record a Cash drop, Payout, Pickup, or Adjustment, each with an amount and an optional note.
The sign convention here is worth knowing, because it's the reverse of how some shops use the word "drop": in SalesThumb, a Cash drop *increases* the expected drawer total. Payout and Pickup both *decrease* it. Adjustment is a manual correction where you explicitly pick Increase or Decrease. The dialog spells out which way each type moves the total before you submit, and the event log color-codes each entry green (adds to the drawer) or red (removes from it) accordingly.
Closing out
"Close out" walks you through counting the drawer. Enter a single counted-cash total, or switch to "Count by denomination" and enter counts of pennies through $100 bills — it sums itself as you type (the counts themselves are what gets saved for the audit trail, not pre-multiplied dollar amounts). Expected cash is always the opening float plus every drop/payout/pickup/adjustment logged so far.
The variance (counted minus expected) is color-coded: green and labeled "Balanced" at exactly zero, amber for anything up to $5 off, red beyond that. That $5 threshold is purely a display cue in this page — the server stores the exact variance regardless of size, so a $4.99 miss isn't treated as acceptable, it's just not flagged red.
Once a session closes, someone else clicking "Close out" on the same session (a double-click, or a second person racing to close it) gets rejected with "Session was already closed by a concurrent request" rather than silently overwriting the first person's counted figures.
Permissions and Abort
Open, Log event, and Close out are available to any signed-in shop member — there's no owner/admin/manager restriction on any of them, since whoever's on the register during a shift needs to do all three. "Abort" is the one exception: it's only shown to Owners, Admins, and Managers, and it marks the session ABORTED with no close-out or variance recorded at all. It exists for a stale or mistakenly-opened drawer, not as a way to skip counting cash — use Close out for that even if the count is off.
Every past session — open, closed, or aborted — is listed in Session history with its opening float, counted amount, expected amount, and variance; click the eye icon on any row to see its full event log.