Helferliste Team · August 2026 · 7 min read · Auf Deutsch · En français · In italiano

The till at a club event: float, vouchers and cash-up

The roster is done, the helpers are assigned – and then a sheet of paper covered in tally marks appears on the bar. On Sunday evening the treasurer sits in front of a till that is 40 francs short, and nobody knows where the money went. This article is about what a till at a club event actually has to do.

A festival till is not a shop system in miniature. It stands on a trestle table, it is operated by volunteers who change every four hours and who got two minutes of instruction, and it works in a place where the mobile network collapses. Copy a retail till and ignore all that, and you will have a problem on the day.

What a till at an event has to do

Before you choose between paper, spreadsheet and app, these five points decide whether the books will balance.

• Explainable in two minutes – the person on the bar changes every four hours. Anything that needs training will not be used.
• Works without a network – on a festival ground with a thousand visitors reception drops. A till that stops costs revenue.
• Separate per point of sale – bar, grill and coffee stand each settle on their own. One shared pot hides every discrepancy.
• Free vouchers with a value – feeding the helpers is not revenue, but it costs the club money. Both have to stay visible.
• Readable on Monday – who booked what and when has to be legible the next day, not only in the bar manager’s head.

Cash: float, change, cash drops

The most common mistake happens before the first sale. Fill the till with three fifty franc notes and you cannot serve the first twenty guests who pay for a four franc beer with a twenty.

How much change belongs in the till?

As a rule of thumb: 150 to 300 francs per till, most of it in 1, 2 and 5 franc coins and ten franc notes. With prices in whole and half francs you barely need anything below 50 centimes – a good reason to keep the price list in fifty centime steps from the start. It saves arithmetic, time and arguments.

Taking money out when the drawer gets full

After four hours of a busy bar there can easily be two thousand francs in the drawer. That does not belong in an open box next to the tap. Common practice: once an agreed amount is exceeded, the treasurer removes part of it, notes the amount, the time and both names, and puts the money in the safe.

What matters is that this drop shows up in the settlement. Otherwise exactly the 1,500 francs you removed will be missing, and half the night goes into the search. A usable festival till therefore knows not only sales, but also pay-ins and pay-outs.

Accounting for free helper vouchers

Almost every club gives its helpers vouchers for food and drink. In accounting terms that is not a sale – but it is not nothing either. The sausage costs the club its purchase price, and the committee wants to know at the end what feeding the helpers came to.

The clean solution: the voucher goes through the till as its own kind of transaction, with the normal list price recorded next to it. The till stays at zero income, and yet a figure appears at the end: “helper catering, 1,240 francs at list price”. Create an item priced at zero instead and you lose precisely that figure.

The kitchen does not need a second till

At the grill and in the kitchen nobody takes payment, people work. Still, what was ordered at the till has to reach them – and today that usually happens by shouting, by scraps of paper, or via someone running back and forth.

A simple screen in the kitchen showing every order solves this without another till. One thing matters: the kitchen must be able to tick off individual lines, not just whole orders. When the chips are ready and the sausage is still on the grill, that is half an order – and that is exactly where many systems fail.

Open tabs and table service

As soon as there is table service, “order and pay right away” is no longer enough. The guest orders a round at eight, the next at nine, and pays for everything at the end – possibly at a different till from the one that took the order.

Solve that with paper and you lose tabs. Solve it digitally and you have to make sure an open table can only be settled once. A table charged twice is the shortest route to an angry guest.

After the event: the cash-up

The treasurer’s real work starts when the last guests leave. For every till and every shift they need four numbers:

• Float – what was in the till at the start.
• Turnover – what was sold, excluding free vouchers.
• Pay-ins and pay-outs – money taken out, change added.
• Cash counted – what is actually in the drawer.

The difference between expected and counted is the only number the committee really cares about. Small discrepancies are normal – somewhere change was given wrongly. It only becomes awkward when nobody can explain where a discrepancy came from. That is why splitting by shift pays off: 30 francs missing in one particular shift is a lead; 30 francs missing across the whole event is noise.

Does the club pay VAT on event turnover?

Swiss VAT has a turnover threshold. Non-profit sports and cultural associations run by volunteers, and charitable institutions, are exempt up to 250,000 francs of annual turnover; for everyone else the threshold is 100,000 francs. Most club festivals stay well below it, which is why the till manages without tax rates.

You only know that for certain if you know your own figures – and a club with several large events a year gets closer to the threshold than it thinks. When in doubt the treasurer settles this with the Federal Tax Administration before the event, not after.

Paper, spreadsheet or app?

For a cake stand at a neighbourhood fair, a till with a tally sheet is perfectly fine. From two points of sale, rotating shifts and a few thousand francs of turnover onwards the balance tips: reconstructing the figures on Monday costs more than setting things up properly on Friday.

If you already keep your roster online, it makes sense to attach the till to the same event: same points of sale, same shifts, one settlement. That is exactly how the Helferliste event till works – it keeps booking without reception, shows the kitchen every order, and settles per till shift at the end. You can try it in the demo club, no sign-up needed.

Whatever you choose: agree beforehand who counts the float, who is allowed to take money out, and who does the cash-up. Those three names save more evenings than any software.