There is one practice that reliably predicts whether a festival’s accounts will be clean, and it has nothing to do with software or spreadsheets. It is whether somebody counts the money against the record every single night.
The whole procedure
It takes five minutes and it is not complicated.
- Count the physical cash in the box
- Total the cash collections recorded today
- Compare the two numbers
- Check the UPI credits against the collections recorded as UPI
- If there is a difference, resolve it tonight, with the people who are still here
- Note the closing balance and who is holding it
Why tonight and not tomorrow
A ₹500 difference discovered tonight is a question, “did anyone take change from the box?”, answered in thirty seconds by someone standing next to you. The same ₹500 discovered in November is an accusation with no defence, because nobody remembers a Tuesday in September. The amount never changes. What changes is whether it is solvable.
Two people, always
Count with someone else present. Not because anybody is suspected, but because a number two people agreed on at 10pm is a fact, and a number one person wrote down alone is a claim. This protects the treasurer more than anyone.
The close is only easy if the recording was
All of this collapses if collections were not recorded as they happened, because then the “record” you are counting against is itself a reconstruction of the evening. The nightly close is not a substitute for recording at the point of collection, it is the thing that proves you did it.