One sale, two ways to pay: split payments
How Achekam's till handles a customer paying part in cash and part by card, M-Pesa or voucher, what the receipt shows, and how each part is booked.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Retail businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
It happens at every busy counter. A customer's basket comes to more than the cash in their purse, so they hand over what notes they have and ask to put the rest on a card. Another arrives with a gift voucher from a birthday that does not quite cover the jacket they want. A third pays most of it by M-Pesa and tops up with coins.
Split payments are ordinary for customers and awkward for shops. Done badly, they leave the cash drawer short, the card total wrong, and a voucher that seems to have been spent twice. This article explains how Achekam's till handles a sale paid in more than one way, what each part does in your books, and what to watch at cash-up.
The sale must be paid in full before it is accepted
The server refuses any till sale that is not paid in full. A split payment is therefore one sale with several payment lines that together cover the total, not two half-sales.
That rule protects you. A cashier cannot accept part of the money, send the customer away to fetch the rest, and leave an open sale that nobody remembers. If the customer cannot cover the full basket, items come off until they can, or the sale does not happen.
If a customer genuinely needs to pay over time, that is a different arrangement, such as an invoice with a payment link or an account, not a split payment at the till.
Cash with change, plus a card or mobile part
Take a customer whose basket is more than the notes they are carrying. The cashier records the cash part first, then the card part for the balance.
For cash, the till records the money handed over and the change given. Count the notes in front of the customer before recording them, and give change only on the cash part. A common mistake is to calculate change against the whole basket, which hands the customer money the card has already paid for.
For the card part, the cashier runs the remaining amount on the bank's terminal and records it at the till from the terminal's slip. The till is not connected to any card machine, so the amount on the slip and the amount typed at the till must match exactly. Run the card for the balance only, never for the full basket.
In Kenya, a shilling till can send an M-Pesa payment prompt to the customer's phone for the balance instead, with the amount rounded to whole shillings by the business's rounding rule. The customer approves on their phone, and the part counts once it is confirmed.
A voucher covering part of the basket
Gift vouchers sold at the till carry a code. They are held as a liability until redeemed by that code, and they are sold without VAT. In South Africa a voucher lasts at least 36 months; for Kenya and Nigeria, the no-VAT-on-sale treatment is marked as not yet confirmed and the business's own setting applies.
When a voucher covers part of a basket, the cashier redeems it by its code as one payment line and takes the rest by another method. Check the voucher's remaining value before you start, so the customer knows how much they still need to pay. Sports clubs and spas handle vouchers in a similar way; see gift vouchers at a gym or spa.
Each part to its own ledger account
Every till sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with each payment method going to its own account. A split payment simply produces more than one payment line in that journal.
Walk through a sale paid partly by voucher, partly in cash and partly by card:
- the voucher part reduces the voucher liability, because the shop has now delivered what the voucher promised;
- the cash part increases the cash account, net of change given;
- the card part increases the card account, to be cleared when the bank settles;
- on the other side, revenue and output VAT are recorded once, for the whole sale, and cost of sales comes off inventory at the products' cost prices.
The split does not change the sale. It only changes where the money is waiting. The full account-by-account picture of a till sale is in what a till sale posts to your books.
What the receipt shows the customer
The till receipt is a PDF made by the server from the posted sale. It shows every payment, VAT by rate and the business's tax number, and it can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed to the customer.
For a split payment that matters: the customer sees exactly how much went on each method, which settles the most common question afterwards, "how much did you put on my card?". In South Africa, section 26 of the Consumer Protection Act, available on Acts Online, sets out the written record a supplier must give a consumer for every transaction and what it must contain. Receipts at a clinic reception face the same questions; see patient receipts at reception.
Cash-up when part of a sale was cash
At cash-up the cashier counts the drawer by notes and coins. The server works out the expected cash, records the difference, and posts it to cash over and short.
Because the server knows each sale's cash part, the expected cash includes only the cash portion of split sales, net of change. So a cash-up difference after a busy day of split payments is more likely to come from counting or change than from the split itself.
Three habits keep split payments clean at cash-up:
- Record payment lines in the order the money is handed over.
- Keep every card slip with the day's paperwork, and match the slip to the card line.
- When the drawer is short, look first at split sales where change was given.
Show every cashier a split sale in training, with a voucher, cash and a card, and let them see the receipt before they face a real queue.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
