Tills and stock locations for several branches

How a gym with several branches sets up tills and stock locations, avoids the branch picker's invented names, and closes each branch's business day.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Fitness businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Opening a second club changes the front desk more than people expect. At one site, "the till" is a single thing everyone understands. With two or three sites, you need to know which desk sold the protein bar, which branch's fridge it came out of, and which manager is responsible for the cash at the end of the day.

Achekam's till, which comes with the Point of Sale add-on, can handle several branches, but only if the set-up reflects how your clubs really work. This article covers how to arrange tills and stock locations for a multi-branch gym, one screen to ignore, and how each branch closes its day.

Each till opened at one of your stock locations

The building block is the stock location. With the Warehousing add-on, a business keeps its stock locations on the server, such as stores, bins, vans and warehouses, with the quantity on hand at each. For a gym group, the natural set-up is one location per branch, plus a central store if you buy supplements and drinks in bulk and send them out.

Several tills can run at once, and each is opened at one of your stock locations. A till sale takes the sold quantity off stock at that till's location in the same step. So a smoothie sold at the Rosebank front desk comes off Rosebank's fridge, not the head office store, provided the Rosebank till was opened at the Rosebank location.

A cashier opens a till by naming it and entering the float they counted, and only one session can be open per till name. Name tills so the branch is obvious from the name alone:

The cashier on a till is whoever is signed in, so give each staff member their own login rather than a shared front-desk account. When a sale is queried, you want to know who rang it up.

Receipt numbers that never clash between tills

With desks at several branches selling at once, receipt numbers could easily collide. They do not: the server hands out receipt numbers so two tills never share one. A member who queries a charge can quote the receipt number, and it leads straight to the sale, the till and the branch.

Receipts also matter to members. In South Africa, the Consumer Protection Act's section on sales records sets out the written record a supplier must give a consumer for every transaction and what it must contain. In Nigeria and Kenya, check the equivalent rules with your adviser. Achekam's till receipt is a PDF made from the posted sale, which members can have printed, downloaded or e-mailed.

The branch picker that lists invented branches

The commerce screens have a branch picker at the top. Today, it lists three invented South African branches instead of your own locations, and whichever name is chosen is sent with each sale.

So ignore it, and make sure nobody relies on it for reporting. The branch a sale belongs to is better read from the till name and the stock location the till was opened at, both of which you control. If you ever see branch names you do not recognise attached to sales, this picker is why.

While you are on those screens, note that the sales figures across the top of the commerce screens count only sales rung up in that browser since the page was opened, and always show rand. They are not branch totals. Use the Z reports and the ledger for those.

Closing each branch's business day

Each till is cashed up at the end of its session. The cashier counts the drawer by notes and coins, and the server works out the expected cash, records the difference and posts it to cash over and short.

Then the branch's business day is closed. It is closed by a supervisor or manager who was not a cashier that day, and closing freezes the day's Z reports, payments, VAT by rate and differences. For a gym group, decide per branch who does this:

• At a large branch, the duty manager who did not work the desk.
• At a small branch where the manager also covers reception, a manager from another branch, or the operations manager remotely.

What matters is that the person closing the day did not take money that day. Write the rota down; a branch whose day nobody closes is a branch whose figures can still move.

One journal per sale or one summary per session

Every till sale posts to your ledger. You can choose whether the till posts one journal per sale or one summary journal per till session per day. A gym with busy desks at several branches will usually find the summary option easier to read in the general ledger, because each branch's day shows as a few lines instead of hundreds. The detail stays available on the till's reports.

Choose before the first branch goes live, and keep the same choice across all branches, so the ledger reads the same way for each.

Setting up the next branch

Create the branch's stock location, name its tills, give its staff their own logins, and decide who closes its day. Then train the desk to ignore the branch picker. For seeing income branch by branch once the tills are running, read income per branch. For handing one till between reception shifts, see reception shifts on one till, and for members paying by scanning a code at the desk, see members paying by QR code at the front desk.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.