Open the shift with a float, and every cash sale and refund belongs to it. At close, count the drawer before the screen shows you what it should hold. Expected cash is the float plus cash sales minus cash refunds, counted minus expected is your signed over or short, and the Z report records all of it broken out by tender.
Ask ten campground owners how the store drawer gets counted and you'll get ten answers, most of them involving a notebook. The count itself is fine. What's usually missing is the number the drawer was supposed to hold, computed from the sales rather than from memory, so that the difference means something.
How does a register shift start?
A shift starts when someone opens the drawer with a starting amount. That's the float: the ones and fives you keep for change. From that moment the shift is a container. Every cash sale and every cash refund taken at the register belongs to it, along with the name of whoever opened it and the time they did. Your park has one drawer open at a time, so there's never a question about which shift a sale belongs to.
What is a blind count, and why does it matter?
At close, the person counting enters what's physically in the drawer before the screen shows them what it should be. That order matters. A count taken after seeing the expected figure isn't a count, it's a confirmation, and it hides the thing you're counting for.
Then the screen does the arithmetic: the float, plus cash sales, minus cash refunds, equals expected. Counted minus expected is your over or short, signed, so a negative number is short and a positive is over.
What is a Z report?
The Z report is the shift's receipt. It carries the float, the expected figure, the counted figure, the signed variance, and the breakdown by tender, and it ties to the same payment and refund records the rest of the books read from. Print it, staple it to the count sheet, file it. Managers can pull any closed shift back up later with the same numbers on it, because the record is written once and kept rather than recalculated from whatever the data looks like in November.
The tender breakdown is the part people underuse. Cash is the only tender the drawer can be wrong about, but the card, guest credit, and charge to site totals tell you what kind of store you're running. A store where two thirds of the volume goes to folios is a store where charge to site is doing real work, and it's also a store where a night of dead card readers wouldn't have cost you much.
Is a drawer that's $2 over a problem?
So the drawer is two dollars over. Nobody stole two dollars. Somebody gave the wrong change on a firewood sale, or a guest waved off a couple of quarters. The value isn't in the two dollars, it's in the fact that the number exists at all, on a specific shift, with a specific person's name on it.
What you're really buying is a baseline. When a drawer comes up forty dollars short in July, you want to know whether that's unusual, and the only way to know is to have a season of ordinary variance behind you. Over and short is a habit, not an accusation, and it works because it's boring.
What's the difference between a drawer count and a day close?
A drawer counts a shift. A shift is a person and a stretch of hours. What it can't tell you is whether the business day is finished: whether the second clerk closed out, whether the arrivals got decided, whether anything is still hanging. That's the day close, and it's the piece that makes yesterday final.