How to Clean a Drawer

"Cleaning" a drawer is VMX's term for counting a cash drawer at the end of its use: you count the cash by denomination, compare it to what the register expected, pull out the deposit, and mark the drawer Clean so it's ready to go back into a register. The count happens on the per-drawer Drawer Report screen, reached from Reports → Registers → Drawers.

Before you count: prerequisites for cleaning a drawer

Permission — the Clean button only appears for employees with the Clean Drawers permission (set per employee or per group in Admin → Permissions). Without it you can still view the drawer report, but you can't record a count.
The drawer must be Dirty — a drawer can only be cleaned after its register has been Z'd. If the Drawers list shows the drawer as In Use, go to that register and press X/Z to Z the drawer first; once its state changes to Dirty it can be counted and cleaned.
Have the physical drawer in front of you, sorted by denomination.

Open the drawer's count screen

Go to Reports → Registers → Drawers.
Find the drawer in the list. You clean Dirty drawers — a Clean drawer has already been counted, and an In Use drawer isn't done for the day yet.
Click the blue drawer name link (for example Drawer 1 - Dirty). The Drawer Report opens with a heading like "Drawer 1 Report for" followed by the date.

For most stores the report covers a single business date. Some stores are configured so each cleaning covers the whole period since the drawer was last cleaned (useful when a drawer isn't counted every day) — in that mode the heading shows the exact date-and-time range being counted. That period mode is configured per-client by VMX; contact help@vmxllc.com if you'd like it.

If you open the report for a date in the future, it just says This is a future day. — change the report date to the day the drawer was used.

Reading the tender table at the top of the Drawer Report

The table at the top of the Drawer Report shows what the register(s) recorded taking in on this drawer, broken out by tender type. There's a pair of columns (count and dollar amount) for each register the drawer was used at, plus a Daily Totals column pair that combines them.

Rows are tender types: Cash, Check, Credit (with the card processor or "(External)" noted in parentheses), Gift Card, Store Credit, Deposit Applied, and so on — whatever tenders were actually taken.
The bottom Totals row sums all tenders for each column.
On today's report, a register column may show a NOT Z badge, meaning "This register has not been Z'd." If you see it, the numbers can still change — Z the register before you count the drawer.

The Cash row of this table is what feeds the Cash Tender Total used in the count math below.

Count the cash by denomination

Below the tender table is the denomination table — one row per bill and coin, from $100 down to the smallest coin (the rows match your country's currency). Enter what's in the drawer, one denomination at a time:

Enter a whole number for the quantity of that denomination. For example, 5 in the $20 row means five twenties, or $100.
For an exact dollar amount, use a decimal or a $ sign: $60 or 60.00 in the $20 row means sixty dollars' worth of twenties.
You can enter multiple values separated by spaces and they're added together: 3 $40 in the $20 row = $100.
Press Enter to jump to the next denomination row.

The Drawer Actual Total at the bottom of the table updates as you type — it's the total cash in the drawer according to your counts.

If an entry doesn't make sense, an error appears in red under that row and you must fix it before you can clean the drawer:

Can't understand '...' — the entry isn't a number. Check for typos.
... is not divisible by $... (for example, "50.00 is not divisible by $20") — you entered an exact dollar amount that can't be made from that denomination. Double-check which row you're in, or enter a quantity instead.

Check the totals: expected vs. counted cash

The table to the right of the denomination counts does the math for you:

Row	Meaning
Drawer Initial Cash	The cash the drawer started with. Pre-filled from the previous cleaning's ending cash (see "How starting cash carries forward" below). Correct it here if it's wrong.
Drawer Ending Cash	The cash you want to leave in the drawer for its next use.
Drawer Expected Total	Drawer Initial Cash + Cash Tender Total — the cash that should be in the drawer.
Drawer Actual Total	The total of your denomination counts.
Cash Over/Under	Drawer Actual Total minus Drawer Expected Total. Positive means the drawer is over; negative means it's short.
Cash Tender Total	The cash the register recorded taking in on this drawer (the Cash row of the tender table above).
Deposit Total	Drawer Actual Total minus Drawer Ending Cash — the amount to pull out of the drawer and deposit.

If Cash Over/Under isn't zero, recount before cleaning — common causes are a missed denomination row, a check or payout left in the drawer, or the wrong Initial Cash. Once you clean the drawer, the over/under amount is recorded permanently on the Drawers Over/Under report.

Some stores are set up for blind counting: the employee doing the count doesn't see the Drawer Expected Total, Cash Over/Under, Cash Tender Total, or Deposit Total rows (or the Cash row of the tender table) — they just count what's there, and managers review the over/under afterward. Blind counting is enabled per-client by VMX; contact help@vmxllc.com if you'd like it for your store.

Add notes to a drawer count

The Notes box under the totals table saves free-form text (up to 256 characters) with the cleaning — use it to explain a known over/under ("$20 paid out for stamps, receipt in envelope") or anything the bookkeeper should see. Notes are stored with the count and shown whenever the cleaning is reviewed later.

Mark the drawer as clean

Make sure every red count error is resolved. Clicking Clean with errors still showing pops up Please resolve count issues before cleaning.
Make sure Drawer Initial Cash and Drawer Ending Cash contain numbers — otherwise you'll see Initial Cash must be a number. or Ending Cash must be a number.
Click the Clean button below the Notes box.
Confirm the Mark drawer as clean? prompt.

When the cleaning saves:

The drawer's state changes to Clean — it's ready to be put back in a register.
The page reloads showing the saved count. All fields are now read-only; a recorded cleaning can't be edited.
The over/under amount appears on the Drawers Over/Under report.
Pull the Deposit Total out of the drawer for the bank deposit, leaving the Drawer Ending Cash amount in the drawer.

Don't navigate away mid-count: the page warns "Any unsaved changes will be lost!" — counts aren't saved until you click Clean.

Review a past drawer count

Saved cleanings are read-only records. To review one, open the Drawers Over/Under report and click the row for the cleaning you want — the Drawer Report opens showing the denomination counts, the Initial/Ending/Expected/Actual figures, and the notes exactly as they were recorded.

Force Clean (mark clean without counting)

On the Drawers list (Reports → Registers → Drawers), employees with the Clean Drawers permission see a Force Clean button next to each Dirty drawer. It marks the drawer Clean immediately — after a "Mark ... as clean?" confirmation — without recording a count, so no denomination totals, deposit, or over/under are saved. Use it only when a drawer doesn't need a counted cleaning (for example, a training drawer or a drawer that was never actually used). Some stores have Force Clean turned off per-client by VMX.

How starting cash carries forward

Whatever you enter as Drawer Ending Cash at one cleaning becomes the Drawer Initial Cash shown at the next cleaning of the same drawer. So if your store keeps $200 in the drawer overnight, you enter 200.00 as the ending cash today, and tomorrow's count form will already show 200.00 in the Drawer Initial Cash row — no extra step needed.

The "Drawer Initial Cash" value set in Admin → Configuration only applies as a fallback for a brand-new drawer that has never been cleaned. Once a drawer has at least one cleaning record, the most recent cleaning's ending cash takes over — changing the admin config later does not retroactively change what shows up at count time.

If your starting cash is wrong on the count form

If today's count form shows the wrong starting cash (e.g., $157.25 when you wanted $157.00), don't worry about the admin config — fix it at the next cleaning:

Count the drawer normally
Enter the correct value in the Drawer Ending Cash field (e.g., 157.00)
Click Clean

The next cleaning will start from that corrected value automatically. The bad value is now history; you won't see it again.