Withdraw and Send: Record Two-Step POS Cash-Outs in One Entry

The pain: the transaction that breaks every notebook

It happens ten times a day at every busy stand. A customer wants to withdraw ₦30,000, but they do not want all of it in their hand. They want to send ₦25,000 straight to their sister in Ibadan and carry only ₦5,000 home. One customer, one visit, but your notebook now needs a withdrawal row and a transfer row, two charges, and some arithmetic about how much cash actually left your drawer.

Most agents get this wrong in one of three ways. They record it as a full ₦30,000 withdrawal, which overstates the cash that left the drawer by ₦25,000. They record it as a ₦25,000 transfer, which loses the withdrawal completely. Or they record both as separate full transactions, which double-counts money that never physically moved. By evening, the drawer count disagrees with the book, and nobody knows why.

The truth is that this is not two transactions. It is one transaction with three numbers, and it deserves an entry type built for it.

What withdraw and send is

Gazeloft's POS space has a dedicated withdraw and send entry, stored as a single sent_out transaction. One row captures the whole story:

• Amount sent: the money forwarded onward on the customer's behalf. This is the entry's main amount.
• Withdrawn amount: the total the customer withdrew from their own account through your terminal.
• Cash given: the physical notes you actually handed the customer, which is usually the withdrawn amount minus the amount sent onward.

The cash movements follow the real desk. The cash you give leaves your drawer. And here is the clever part: cash given also represents a shift of money from your drawer side to your bank side, because the customer's full withdrawal settles into your account while only part of it left your drawer as notes. Gazeloft applies this drawer-to-bank shift automatically, so your cash-at-hand and cash-in-bank both land exactly where a physical count would put them.

As always in the POS space, the charge is typed by you, never auto-derived. A combined withdraw-and-send usually earns a bigger charge than either step alone, and that price is your call.

Step-by-step: recording it in the app

1. Open your POS space and start a new entry.
2. Choose Withdraw and send as the type.
3. Enter the amount sent (what you forwarded onward, for example ₦25,000).
4. Enter the withdrawn amount (the total the customer pulled from their account, for example ₦30,000).
5. Enter the cash given (the notes that left your drawer, for example ₦5,000).
6. Type the charge you collected for the whole service.
7. Tap your fee preset or chips for the provider fee, debit fee, VAT and stamp duty that apply.
8. Save. One row, three numbers, ledger exact.

Step-by-step: on the web dashboard

At gazeloft.com the same form exists in your POS space. Pick withdraw and send, fill the three amounts and the charge, apply fees, save. If you are catching up on yesterday's entries, set the date field so the entry lands on the right day.

Worked example: Emeka's sister in Ibadan

Emeka runs a stand in Onitsha. Drawer: ₦120,000. Bank: ₦350,000.

A customer withdraws ₦30,000, sends ₦25,000 to his sister, and takes ₦5,000 cash. Emeka charges ₦600 for the combined service. His provider fees for the day's bands come to ₦140 on this transaction.

He records one withdraw and send entry: amount sent ₦25,000, withdrawn amount ₦30,000, cash given ₦5,000, charge ₦600, fees ₦140.

What happens to the ledger:

• Drawer: only ₦5,000 in physical notes left it. Cash-at-hand: 120,000 minus 5,000 = ₦115,000.
• Bank: the customer's withdrawal settles in, the onward transfer goes out, and the ₦5,000 of cash given is recognised as a drawer-to-bank shift. The net effect lands his float exactly where his terminal statement will show it.
• Profit: ₦600 minus ₦140 = ₦460 on one entry.

Now compare the wrong ways. Recorded as a full ₦30,000 withdrawal, the app would think ₦30,000 in notes left the drawer, and tonight's count would be ₦25,000 "over", a mystery surplus. Recorded as two separate full transactions, the books would show ₦55,000 of movement for a customer who touched ₦30,000. One typed entry, and the mystery never exists.

Scale it up and the stakes get serious. If Emeka handles eight withdraw and send visits a day and records them the wrong way, his drawer count can drift by six figures a week, and the drift is in both directions, so it does not even show up as a steady shortage he could hunt down. The sent_out entry is not a convenience. It is the difference between a drawer count that means something and one that does not.

Tips and pitfalls

• Get the three numbers from the customer up front. "How much are you withdrawing, how much are we sending, how much do you carry?" Ask it as one question and the entry fills itself.
• Cash given is what physically left the drawer, nothing else. If the customer took no cash at all and sent everything, cash given is zero, and that is a valid entry.
• Price the combined service deliberately. You are doing two jobs. Many agents charge roughly the withdrawal fee plus the transfer fee, sometimes with a small discount for the bundle. Whatever you decide, type the real figure.
• Do not split it into two entries. The whole point of sent_out is that splitting double-counts the money. One visit, one row.
• Watch these entries in your history. Withdraw and send rows are often your highest-charge transactions. The history page will show you how much of your profit comes from them.

One visit, one row, zero mysteries

The transaction that breaks notebooks is a single tap in Gazeloft. Record your next withdraw and send properly at gazeloft.com.