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Accounting for change in machine


dwpsv

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Almost all the coins I receive from my vending machines, get rolled and put back in the coin mechanism of the machines.  I record the full amount of the bills and coins received as income yet, I do not record the amount that I send out each day to refill the coin mechanisms.  How should I account for all these coins I sent out to refill the machines?  Does somebody know the answer?

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The way we handle this is as follows: each driver is given a predetermined amount of rolled coin. The amount depends on the number of machines they will service and the vend prices of the machines. When the route person services the machine, if the machine requires coins to fill the tubes, they are bought from the bag of rolled coins. Needs roll of nickels? Take $2 from machine collection and exchange for roll from bag. Your rolled coin bag will then always have the same amount which makes it easy to balance. If you would only collect the cash a necking it your collections would report too high( I.e.- customer inserted 100 bill to buy 100 sodas at .75 ea. collections would show $100 but your coin mech would be down 100 qtrs or $25).

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Almost all the coins I receive from my vending machines, get rolled and put back in the coin mechanism of the machines.  I record the full amount of the bills and coins received as income yet, I do not record the amount that I send out each day to refill the coin mechanisms.  How should I account for all these coins I sent out to refill the machines?  Does somebody know the answer?

I fill each tube to the top when I place a machine.  Then at each service interval I refill each one out of the overflow bucket - this way my cash count stays fairly accurate.  It may be slightly off from service cycler to service cycle but averages out in the long run.  What you don't want to do is fail to realize that each dollar bill collected may not be actually a dollar in sales.  Topping off the coin mech eliminates this problem.

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I either exchange coins for dollars from a nearby machine OR I deduct it from the revenue.

 

If a snack machine needs $2 in nickels and the soda machine next to it always has excess nickels, I will simply dispense $2 worth of nickels out of that soda machine, put it in the snack machine's coin mech, and put $2 into my soda machine's revenue bag from the snack machine.

 

Or... if a machine needs $8 in dimes, I will go out to my vehicle and get my dime bag (not to be taken out of context here..) and put $8 in dimes into ANOTHER bag on my way back to the machine to fill it up.  Then, after I have filled that machine up with the $8 in dimes, I will take the bag with the revenue from that machine and simply deduct $8 from it.  So.. if the machine's revenue added up to $32.40 BEFORE putting $8 worth of dimes into it, I will deduct $8 and write down $24.40 in revenue.  That makes it accurate.

 

If you have never recorded the coins you put into your machines but you have recorded the money collected (as revenue), then you will be showing a greater profit than you actually have, be paying higher taxes than you should, and your machines will be off.

 

To give an extreme example, if you had a simple changer machine that dispensed 4 quarters for 1 dollar, and you collected about $100/month from that machine in the form of $1 bills, you would have written $100 in revenue EVEN THOUGH the machine dispensed $100 worth of quarters.  Obviously, dispensing out of a changer is not revenue at all.. it's just a change in the type of currency.  In reality, that changer collected $100 and dispensed $100, giving you a grand total of $0.  A snack machine may have collected $20 in bills and $10 in coins but it dispensed $5 in coins... $30-$5 = $25, not $30.

 

You don't have to keep your coin mechs full (but you should).  Just make sure you DEDUCT the value of coins that you put into a machine.  Make sense?

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Edit:  I felt like my last post was a bit confusing so here is an EASY TO UNDERSTAND thing for anyone reading.

 

Let's say you sell a bag of chips for 80 cents.

 

Let's say someone puts a dollar into the machine to buy that bag of chips.

 

Will you collect 80 cents from the machine?  No, you will collect one dollar.  So how did you end up with 20 cents more than what the chips cost?  You didn't, but that 20 cents was dispensed from the coin mech leaving it 20 cents shorter than it was before the customer bought their bag of chips.

 

That should explain the phenomenon with why we have to account for coins put back into machines.

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