The cash-vs-card split is one of those nouz design choices that seems pedantic until you understand why. Lumping all revenue together as one number would force us to apply your card fee either to everything (over-charging the cash portion) or to nothing (under-charging the card portion). Neither is honest. The split is honest.
01 Why we split
Cash and card sales look identical to your customer but behave differently in your books. Card goes through an acquirer who charges a percentage; cash doesn't. If we lumped them together as one "revenue" number, the transaction-fee math would either over-charge cash (wrong) or under-charge card (also wrong). The split keeps both honest.
There's a secondary benefit too: tracking the cash/card ratio over time tells you something real about your customer behaviour. A drift from 30% cash → 10% cash signals cashless adoption (or maybe a broken cash drawer). A drift the other way might mean customers are dodging the card minimum.
02 Where it shows up
In your P&L, the transaction-fee line is computed only against the card column of every entry. If your card fee is 2% and you took €600 card + €240 cash today, the fee subtracted is 2% × €600 = €12,00 — not 2% × €840.
Across multiple entries in a day or a month, each entry's card column gets its own fee calculation. The P&L fee line is the sum of per-entry fees, not a single multiplication. This matters if your fee rate changes mid-period — each entry uses its snapshot rate.
03 When you only know the total
Some days you might only have the total — the till counted out but the split between cash and card got muddled. Three options:
- Check your acquirer's app. Your card terminal app or merchant portal shows today's card volume. Subtract from the total to get cash.
- Use last week's split as a rough proxy. Most shops have a stable cash:card ratio day-over-day. If last Tuesday was 30% cash / 70% card, apply that ratio.
- Log the whole thing as card if you accept almost no cash. Slightly over-charges fees, but the error is small.
Whichever you pick, do it consistently — don't alternate methods week to week, or your historical numbers will drift in confusing ways.
04 Where BAR and EC come from
EC-Karte was originally an interbank debit network in Germany / Austria; today it's used colloquially to mean any card payment (Visa, Maestro, Mastercard, all of them). Bargeld just means cash. We may eventually localise the column headers to "Cash" / "Card" for English-language users — drop us a note if that'd help you.
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