Cash Variance Thresholds
A cash variance — the gap between what your drawer should hold and what's actually there at close — is a normal part of running a store. What matters is how big the gap is, whether it's growing, and what your store does about it. Variance thresholds let you set policy so the response is automatic.
The three thresholds
| Threshold | Default (PHP) | What happens when variance crosses it |
|---|---|---|
| Minor | ₱50 | Below this, no warning shows on the close screen. Treated as routine. |
| Review | ₱500 | Orange banner on close. Cashier must pick a variance reason from a dropdown before they can finalize the close. |
| Escalation | ₱5,000 | Red banner. Reason is required, plus a free-text explanation. Manager and store owner are notified automatically. |
These thresholds are soft — closing is never blocked. The thresholds drive the warning level, the prompts, and the notification, not whether you can close.
Setting per-store thresholds
Open Preferences
Sign in as the store owner (or an org owner / admin). Sidebar → Configurations → Preferences → Store.
Find the Cash Variance section
Scroll to the Cash Variance card.
Set the three values
Enter your Minor, Review, and Escalation thresholds in your store's currency. They should be in ascending order — Fuze Store will warn if not.
Save
Save the preference. New thresholds apply to the next session close.
How to pick the right thresholds
There's no universal answer — it depends on your average ticket size and how much cash flows through your drawer per shift.
A reasonable starting point:
- Minor = roughly 0.1–0.2% of a typical day's cash sales. Small enough to be ignored, big enough to flag a counting issue.
- Review = roughly 1% of a typical day's cash sales. Big enough to deserve an explanation; small enough to expect routinely.
- Escalation = roughly 5% of a typical day's cash sales OR a single high-denomination loss (e.g. ₱5,000 / ₱10,000). Big enough that you want a manager looking at it before the next shift.
Tighten over time. If your store consistently runs near zero variance, drop Minor to ₱20 — you'll catch issues earlier. If you're routinely over the Review threshold from genuine miscounts, raise it temporarily and invest in counting training.
Variance reasons
When a cashier crosses Review, they pick from this list:
- Wrong change given — most common cause of small variance.
- Counterfeit bill — a rejected or lost bill.
- Miscount — drawer was counted incorrectly at open or close.
- Theft suspected — flag for management review.
- Unrecorded sale — a sale that bypassed the POS.
- Unrecorded refund — a refund that wasn't rung up.
- Other — requires a free-text explanation.
The reason gets persisted with the closed session and shows on the Z-report.
Who gets notified on escalation
When variance crosses the Escalation threshold:
- The store owner receives a notification through Fuze Store's real-time channel.
- Any staff with the Hub Admin permission also get notified (via the Reverb event
store.session.variance_escalated). - The closed session is flagged in Session History so a manager can drill in later.
Email notification on escalation is on the roadmap; today the notification is in-app only.
Tips
- Don't react to a single bad shift. A ₱600 variance once a month is noise. A ₱200 variance every weekend on the same staff is a pattern worth investigating.
- Pair this with Staff Performance — variance per cashier is a different signal than variance per shift.
- Document the policy. When you set the thresholds, write down what they mean operationally ("over Review, the cashier signs the close sheet alongside the closing manager"). Otherwise the prompt becomes meaningless paperwork.