How a BBQ joint stopped dreading the nightly cash count

Every restaurant has the same little ritual at close: someone counts the drawer, scratches the numbers on a sheet, and hopes the math works out. For a single-location BBQ spot, that was the last chore of a long day — and the place where mistakes were easiest to make.

So we built something small and specific. Staff count the drawer on a phone: a starting count and an ending count, denomination by denomination. The app does the arithmetic and tells them the deposit. No spreadsheet, no calculator, no second-guessing the totals.

The owner side is just as simple. Every sheet lands somewhere an admin can review it, correct it if a bill got miscounted, and export the whole history to CSV when it's time to reconcile with the bank.

The point wasn't to build a "system." It was to take one annoying, error-prone task and make it take a couple of minutes — on the device everyone already has in their pocket.

If your business has a version of this — a nightly count, a recurring tally, a form someone fills out by hand — there's a good chance it can work the same way.