We’ve gotten a lot of questions lately about adding functionality to handle the recent penny shortage. In the currently released version of ThunderPOS, there is no option that will automatically round transactions to the nearest penny. However, we will be releasing a version with rounding early next year as an optional feature.
For the moment, we would suggest simply handling it outside of the system; our average customer does a vast minority of transactions in cash, and this should not cause balancing the drawer to be off by very much.
Currently, there is not legal guidance from the government on how this should be handled. For this reason, we’re providing two new options, in addition to the option to just handle it on the fly outside of the system.
One option, which in general should bring the overall rounding amount close to zero, is to round to the nearest nickel, rounding up if 3 or 4 pennies would be required or down on 1 or 2. This will only be applied if a transaction includes cash; check, credit card, on account, and gift card transactions will not be rounded.
The other option will always favor the customer on cash transactions, meaning that for a positive amount it will be dropped down to the nickel below, and for a negative amount it will be increased. This will cost the store money in the long run, but means that no customer ends up losing any change.
The rounding amount will be available under payment types in the Sales Totals report, as well as showing on the Daily Payment Types report.
We would recommend keeping an eye out for any sort of congressional or state level guidance on this issue, but this feature will be available in January’s update.