Does the till agree with the orders?

Anyone can total a column. What makes a day-end report worth signing is that the two sides reconcile: what was sold against what was taken.

When they do not, that is the headline — not a quiet footnote under a tidy number. A discrepancy found tonight is a shift you can still remember. The same discrepancy found at month end is a number nobody can trace back to an evening.

A discount is a sale at a lower price. A comp is food that went out with nothing charged — no sale, and a cost. A void is an order that never happened at all.

They all reduce takings and rolling them together produces a figure no accountant can unpick, while hiding the only pattern worth spotting: which of the three is climbing. Money given up with no reason recorded gets its own line too, rather than being quietly dropped so the totals look neater.

Best sellers by product and by category, counting only orders that actually completed — a top-ten built from cancelled tickets is a record of what people changed their mind about.

Waste, spillage and remakes are reported separately, in kilograms and litres rather than pounds. A costed write-off looks authoritative and is a guess, and the moment it reads as money somebody subtracts it from takings it was never part of.

A table that sits down at eleven and pays at twenty past midnight belongs to Friday's takings. The day runs from four in the morning to four the next, so one night is one page — and it is configurable, because a 24-hour diner and a breakfast place genuinely differ.