Open bar tabs and parked sales across tills
How a bar or restaurant can hold an open tab as a parked sale on the server, settle it later from any till, and keep each till's float and stock apart.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Hospitality businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Friday evening. A group arrives at the bar after work and asks to run a tab. A couple of hours later they move through to the restaurant for dinner, and at the end of the night someone wants to pay for the lot at the restaurant till. Meanwhile, the bar has two tills open, and nobody can remember which one the tab was started on.
In many venues the tab lives on a slip of paper behind the bar, or in a cashier's head. Slips get lost, rounds get forgotten, and a group occasionally leaves without anyone noticing that the tab was never closed.
This article explains how a bar, restaurant or hotel in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya can run tabs on Achekam's till, and where the limits are.
A tab is a parked sale
On Achekam's till, an open tab is a parked sale. The cashier rings up the first round and parks the sale on the server instead of taking payment. When the next round comes, a cashier picks the tab up, adds the round and parks it once more.
Because the parked sale lives on the server, not on one till's screen, it does not disappear if a device is restarted or a cashier goes off shift. It is also visible to the other tills, which is what makes the rest of this article possible.
Agree one habit for identifying tabs, so any member of staff can find the right one quickly. A tab sheet behind the bar, with the guest's name, a description, the time it was opened and who opened it, works well alongside the till.
Settling at another till, once only
A parked sale can be picked up by any of the business's tills, but only once. The group that started at the bar can settle at the restaurant till, and the bar's till cannot pick up the same sale while the restaurant has it.
That "once only" rule matters on busy nights. Without it, two cashiers could each ring up the same tab and charge the guest twice, or, more commonly, both assume the other one had it.
Dropping a tab needs a reason
Sometimes a parked sale has to go. A tab was opened by mistake, a round was rung up on the wrong tab and re-entered, or guests left without paying. A parked sale can be dropped, and the till asks for a reason.
The reason is the useful part. A walk-out is a loss, and your manager needs to know about it the same night, not discover it as a missing amount weeks later. Make it a house rule that a walk-out is reported to the duty manager before the tab is dropped, and that the reason says what happened.
Several tills, each with its own float
Several tills can run at once, each opened at one of the business's stock locations. A till is opened by naming it and entering the float that was counted, and only one session can be open per till name. The server hands out receipt numbers so two tills never share one.
For a venue, that means the bar, the restaurant and the pool deck can each run their own till with their own float, and each counts up separately at the end of the shift. Because a till sale takes stock off at the till's location, drinks sold at the bar come off the bar's stock and not the restaurant's, as long as each till was opened at the right location.
Paid in full before it counts
The server refuses any till sale that is not paid in full. A tab only becomes a sale when the whole amount is covered.
Groups rarely pay with one card. Each payment method on a sale posts to its own account, and the receipt, a PDF made from the posted sale, shows every payment. So a table can settle with a mix of cards, cash and a pay-page QR code, provided the payments add up to the full total. For cash, the till records the money handed over and the change given, which helps when someone at the table queries their change. In South Africa, section 26 of the Consumer Protection Act sets out the written record a supplier must give a consumer for every transaction and what that receipt must contain.
What the till will not do is close a tab with part of it left owing. A guest who wants to "settle the rest tomorrow" stays parked until they do, which keeps the open amount visible.
What the till does not do
Achekam's restaurant table and kitchen screens store nothing, and the screens say so. There is no table plan or kitchen order flow behind the till. Parked sales are how tabs work; table numbers and kitchen tickets are handled however your venue handles them today.
House rules for tabs
- Decide who may open a tab, and for whom.
- Set a point at which a tab must be settled or checked with the manager.
- Fill in the tab sheet whenever a tab is opened.
- Before last orders, check every parked sale still open.
- Report walk-outs to the duty manager before dropping the tab.
- Keep a pre-booked group package off the bar tab. If it was invoiced and a deposit taken, the balance belongs on the invoice, as group booking deposits without a pro-forma explains.
Open tabs are also the last thing to check before the night's tills are counted. Closing the trading day across bar and restaurant covers that next step.
Introduce the tab sheet and the walk-out rule before your next busy evening. With tabs held on the server and settled once, the paper slips behind the bar can go.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
