I was wondering if there was a solution for managing payouts to customers who sell us product in the POS. We’re a record store and we have people bringing their records in to sell back for cash. We haven’t found a way to document this in the POS, so at the end of the day the drawer is always short and we just document it by writing the payouts on a post-it. Our accountant obviously doesn’t love this idea.
I went back and forth with support and they couldn’t help. Any support or App Store searches just bring up results about payouts from Shopify. Basically, we need something that could log payouts or something that can enable creation of a product with a negative price. It seems like something like this should exist. Any ideas? Thanks!
We have a similar issue, and the only solution we’ve found is to remove cash in the Cash tracking session (making sure to give as much detail as needed in the Note). We can then refer to this tracking session when making the entry in our accounting system.
You could also create a discount code for a set amount (you could have many discounts if the amounts you pay vary, but that can get messy quickly). The only issue with these codes is that you have to apply them to an actual sale, as you cannot have an order with a just a discount.
At this time, there is no way to have negative price products in Shopify out of the box.
You can do this in Shopify POS by creating a product for the cash you give to customers in the form of a “negative sale” or “payout” product. Make the price negative so that when “sold” in POS it will take cash out of your drawer and record the transaction. Use a dedicated POS category such as Customer Buybacks for easier reporting. This way you get a proper audit trail and it integrates with Shopify reporting so your accountant can see it w/o manual post-its. There may be also apps for custom POS transaction types or cash tracking for more formalized processes.
We’ve had the same short at lockup when cash leaves the drawer for buybacks that never hit a sale.
What worked for us is treating the buyback as a paid-out on the tracking session before we count: remove the cash amount, put the seller name or invoice in the note, then count the drawer against the new expected. The session printout and the post-it finally match, and accounting can see why the cash moved without a sale.
When yours go short tonight, is it usually one big buyback, or a pile of small ones that never got logged on the session?
This sounds more like a cash payout or buyback workflow than a normal refund. Using cash tracking with a detailed note seems like the cleanest workaround for now, but it would still be useful if Shopify added a proper vendor payout function so the drawer and accounting records stayed aligned automatically.