How do you stop losing money at the event bar?

Where does bar money go missing?

Mostly in the gaps, not in pockets. Prices nobody wrote down, so each bartender charges differently. Drinks given to friends, artists and staff and never recorded. Change counted wrong at two in the morning. A card machine on one account and a cash box on another, totalled by hand the day after.

The result is the same: the night sold more than the takings say, and nobody can show where the difference went. Treat it as a system problem; most of it is honest mistakes made under pressure.

How does a till per bar help?

When every bar, stand and shop is its own booth with its own menu and prices, every sale is recorded at the price you set, on the counter where it happened. Staff open the till on a phone with a role code, so you know which counter sold what.

A booth can take cash sales and be paused or closed from your dashboard. At Book Club Only, the bar device carried the full menu and stock per item, and the door, the bar and a third-party vendor ran on one dashboard.

The event bar POS

Should you go cashless?

Cashless takes cash off the counter. Each guest gets an event wallet, topped up by card from their phone or with cash at a top-up booth, and spends it by tapping an NFC bracelet or showing their ticket QR. Bartenders never handle change, and the queue at the bar moves faster.

The separation is the point: top-up booths cannot charge and tills cannot credit, and refunds above a threshold need a second approval. Cashless is offered to enterprise clients on a custom proposal, and runs at AndMore Ventures events today.

If cashless is more than your event needs, the till per bar still closes most gaps on its own: fixed prices, a name on every sale and totals you can read at any moment. Start there, and add the wallet when the event grows.

Cashless payments for events

How do you check the numbers during the event?

Watch sales per booth live, not the day after. When ticketing, the bar tills and the wallet all reconcile in one place, a booth that stops selling at peak hour, or sells far less than its stock went down, shows up while you can still walk over and ask.

• Count stock at each bar before doors and at close.
• Record staff drinks and artist riders as their own items, at zero, so they are counted.
• Give each person a role code of their own, so every sale has a name.

How do you set up the bars before doors open?

Most leaks are closed before the first drink is poured.

• Create a booth for each bar, stand and shop, with its menu and prices.
• Give each person behind a counter a role code of their own, for that counter only.
• Place top-up booths away from the bars, so topping up and buying are two separate lines.
• Ring one test sale on every till, and check it appears in your dashboard.
• Count opening stock per bar and write it down where the closing count will be compared.

How do you settle with vendors after the event?

Without a calculator. The Payouts tab lists each vendor's sales, your commission and what each one is owed, from the same records the tills wrote during the night. Everyone sees the same numbers, so the settlement is a review, not an argument.

The vendor POS