Plenty of small shops are really two businesses sharing a counter. A cafe with a shelf of a neighbour's roasted coffee. A market stall carrying a friend's honey. A building owner who sells tea beside the tenant's kitchen.
Two tills would be the obvious answer, and it is almost always the wrong one — it confuses customers, doubles the hardware, and splits your reporting in half. So most people run one till and settle up later from memory, a notebook, or a pile of receipts.
TallyTill now has a better answer: tag each product with an External ID, and the sales report will total what each account sold over any date range.
How it works
1. Tag the products On each product, set an External ID — the account or owner it belongs to. Free text, so it can be a business name, a person, or a department.
2. Sell exactly as before Nothing changes at the till. Staff and customers see no difference, and the tag needs no thought at the point of sale.
3. Open the sales report Switch the Revenue view to 'By External ID' and pick your date range — last month, last week, since you opened.
4. Settle up Each account gets a row: units sold, net sales, tax and total. Export it to CSV and hand it to the other party. The money still lands in one bank account. This tells you how to divide it.
Step 1 — Tag a product with its account
Open Products, edit any product, and you will find an External ID field just under Category.
It is free text with suggestions: type a new account the first time, and after that it will offer the ones you already use, so the same account is spelled the same way every time. That matters more than it sounds — a typo would quietly split one account's payout into two rows.
Leave it blank on anything that is simply yours. A shop where everything belongs to one owner never has to touch this field, and will not even see the extra column in the catalog until something is tagged.
If you already have a long catalog, you do not have to click through it product by product. Export your catalog, fill the External ID column in a spreadsheet, and import it back. Re-importing a file that has no External ID column will leave your existing tags alone.
Step 2 — Read the report
Go to Reports → Sales, and use the By External ID button at the top right.
You will get one row per account for whatever date range you have selected, showing sales, units, tax and net. Expand a row and it breaks down into the individual products that account sold, so a disputed figure can be traced to the item that produced it.
The Export CSV button follows whichever view you are looking at, so from the grouped view you get a per-account statement rather than a raw list of sales.
One cart can belong to two accounts
This is the case that makes a shared counter awkward, and it is handled. If a customer buys a coffee from you and a bag of tea from the other seller in the same checkout, that single sale contributes to both accounts — each line item carries its own tag. You do not need to ask customers to pay separately.
The tag is recorded on the sale, not looked up later
Worth understanding, because it protects you.
When an item sells, the account tag is written onto that sale permanently. It is not looked up from the product afterwards. So if you later move a product to a different account — or stop selling it entirely — last month's figures do not move. A payout you have already settled stays settled.
The flip side is that anything sold before you started tagging shows up under (Untagged), and re-tagging the product now will not backfill it. If you want a clean split from a particular date, tag your catalog before that date rather than after.
What this does not do
It is worth being straight about the boundary. External IDs are a reporting feature, not a settlement one.
All card sales still settle into the one connected account, exactly as before. TallyTill is not splitting the payment at the register or paying two parties separately. What you get is an accurate, itemised statement of what each account sold, so the two of you can settle between yourselves without arguing from memory.
For a lot of shared counters, that is the entire problem solved. If you genuinely need the money to land in two different banks, that is a different and much larger piece of work — talk to us about it rather than assuming this covers it.
Getting started
- Open Products and tag a handful of items with an account name.
- Ring up a test sale that includes one tagged and one untagged item.
- Open Reports → Sales, switch to By External ID, and check the split.
Nothing needs enabling and there is no setting to turn on. The field is on every product now, and the report view appears as soon as you have tagged something.