Every tender you take,
reconciled to the dollar.

Every point-of-sale system can tell a store how much cash should be in the till. Square models a shift with an expected cash figure and a counted one; Lightspeed Retail closes a register by denomination and shows the difference per payment type. That half of retail was solved twenty years ago. What none of their published documentation describes is the other half — checking that a lease-to-own sale was ever actually paid for.

Then a customer buys a washer on Acima, and the same system that was careful about three dollars in quarters records $1,800 and stops thinking about it. Square's published tender list runs card, cash, gift card, bank account, wallet and buy-now-pay-later — and then OTHER, which Square's developer reference defines as “a form of tender that does not match any other value.” Clover will let you build a custom tender button for any method you like; its documentation covers logo sizes and cancel buttons, because a custom tender records an amount rather than moving or verifying funds.

Every POS will let you add a button labelled Acima. None of them will then go and check that Acima paid you.

That is a reading of those vendors' own published documentation in September 2026 rather than a claim that nothing anywhere does it. Enterprise furniture and appliance ERPs — STORIS among them — do integrate with lease-to-own providers, and they are sold at enterprise scale on a custom quote with no published price. For an appliance, electronics or furniture store running small-business software, that blind spot is where most of the revenue lives, which is why UpChannels builds the close around tenders rather than around the drawer.

When a customer buys a sectional on Acima, the store has not taken a payment — it has sold the sectional to Acima. Upbound Group's Form 10-K describes its Acima segment exactly that way: Acima purchases the merchandise the customer selected from the third-party retailer when that customer enters into the lease and the product is delivered. For a furniture or appliance dealer, the counterparty is a company with terms rather than a customer with a card, and four things follow from that.

UpChannels gives every lease a state instead of a label: sold, delivered, confirmed to the provider, funded, deposited, or reversed. Open any day and you can see which leases are still owed to the store, which are past the funding window that provider publishes for itself, and which went backwards. Those timings are each provider's own stated expectation rather than a guarantee, which is exactly why a store should be tracking them instead of assuming them.

A change drawer is an imprest fund: a fixed amount replenished back to the same fixed amount, where only documented spending is replenished. That discipline is why over-and-short means anything at all. The moment somebody tops up the till with $200 from the safe on a busy Saturday and nobody writes it down, every over-and-short figure after it is noise.

Point-of-sale systems record the float as a number attached to a shift, so nothing can answer how much change cash the store owns or how much was pulled for coin last month. UpChannels records it as an account with a running balance — what the drawer should hold, every refill in, every sweep out, and a monthly ledger a small retailer can hand straight to a bookkeeper.

Month-end is the same principle one level up: stating where every dollar of the month actually sits — what became cash, what was deposited, what is still a lease waiting on a provider, and what came back. That produces a settled position rather than a bank balance: the cushion you are deliberately holding for float, payroll and supplier terms, and what is genuinely free to take out. Owner distributions are recorded as equity, not as an expense, so the books still make sense when your accountant opens them.

You should not decide what to take out of the business until you know how much of last month is money and how much is still a promise.