A Polish restaurant records sales on a fiscal cash register and issues the receipt when the sale is completed, not at the end of the evening. The daily fiscal report closes the day as a separate obligation. An annulled receipt does not vanish: it survives as its own record, which is why the till total and the management report rarely match by accident.
This page holds two things: the duties that fall on your evening, and where the gap between the till and your books is born. It does not choose a till model, does not replace an accountant, and prints no tax rates at all. Rates belong to another page in this section, gross or net in your indicators, where they are checked against the norm.
Where the duty to run a till is actually written
The obligation does not come from your accountant, your POS vendor, or custom. It comes from the Polish VAT act (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 775), and it is worth knowing which article, because the scope of the duty is written into the same sentence.
Article 111 paragraph 1 puts the duty on taxpayers who sell to natural persons not conducting business activity and to flat-rate farmers. Read that as a restaurant owner and one thing follows: the counter does not sort your guests. A company director paying for a working lunch out of a private card is a natural person at that moment. The duty applies to the sale, not to the guest's job title.
The same article carries the consequence.
Paragraph 3 covers the reserve till, and it ends with the sentence that shift managers most need to hear: if recording on the reserve till is also impossible, the taxpayer may not make the sale. Not "may record it later" — may not sell.
Article 111a of the same act sets up the Central Repository of Tills, which receives data from online tills. On those tills the daily report is not only your document. It leaves the building.
The act also says what the record has to hold. Article 111 paragraph 1b requires the sales record to show the data contained in the documents issued by the till: the subject of taxation, the amount of the tax base and of the tax due, and the data identifying individual sales, including the number by which the taxpayer is identified for tax purposes. A till with one catch-all button called "food" is therefore not merely untidy housekeeping. Identifying individual sales is part of what the record is required to carry, and a menu that exists only in the kitchen cannot be reconstructed afterwards from a single line.
Fiscalisation: the moment a till becomes a till
Fiskalizacja is the single, irreversible act after which a cash register starts keeping fiscal memory. Before it, the machine at the counter is hardware, not a till in the meaning of the norm.
The regulation on cash registers (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 845) defines it in § 2 point 5 and describes the procedure in § 23 paragraph 4, where the process is completed by issuing a daily fiscal report.
§ 3 paragraph 1 of the same regulation then requires that every sale be recorded only in fiscal mode, after fiscalisation — including sales that are exempt from tax. An exempt sale is still a recorded sale. That single line removes the most common informal rule in kitchens: "we do not ring up what is not taxed."
The regulation also sets a technical inspection at least every two years (§ 55 paragraph 1), counted for the first time from fiscalisation (§ 55 paragraph 3). It is a calendar item, not a reaction to a fault: it belongs beside your fire inspection, not on the list of things you do when something breaks.
The receipt is handed over when the sale is paid, not at the end of the evening
§ 6 paragraph 1 point 1 of the regulation on cash registers is the sentence that decides how the floor works. It requires the seller to issue the receipt and hand it to the buyer without being asked, during the sale, no later than the moment payment is accepted, regardless of the form of payment. Article 111 paragraph 3a point 1 of the VAT act carries the same duty at the level of the act, and it names two acceptable documents: a fiscal receipt or an invoice from every sale, on paper or — with the buyer's consent — electronically. That wording has a dated change attached to it in the consolidated text, narrowing the point to the receipt from 1 January 2027, so the plural is worth watching rather than memorising.
The regulation allows the same substitution in the same point, and it is easy to miss: instead of a fiscal receipt the seller may issue an invoice using the till and hand that to the buyer. The duty is to put a fiscal document into the guest's hand at the moment of payment. Which of the two documents it is, is a second question, and it is the guest who usually decides it.
Three habits die on that sentence: printing at the end of the shift, printing only for guests who ask, and putting one receipt on a table that paid in four cards, where the norm expected each payment moment to be covered.
Prepayments deserve their own line: banquets and large group bookings run on them. § 6 paragraph 1 point 2 handles advance payments: cash advances are recorded at the moment they are received, and transferred advances promptly after the money is credited, at the latest by the end of that month — or before the sale, if the sale happens first. A deposit taken in March for a wedding in June is a March record.
The display matters too. § 6 paragraph 1 point 8 requires it to be placed so that the buyer can read the recorded amount. § 6 paragraph 1 point 10 requires the operator to check the document before confirming it. Both are floor discipline, and both are written down.
Two further points of the same paragraph belong to the same evening. Point 9 requires the till to be kept in a technical condition that guarantees a legible printed receipt or invoice, and for electronic documents a legible view that lets the buyer check the sale was recorded correctly. Point 7 requires fiscal documents and their copies, including the data held in protected memory, to be kept for the period the tax and accounting laws require, and to remain accessible. A thermal roll faded to grey and a drawer nobody can open fail the same rule in the same way.
The second obligation landing on the same evening — accepting cash and showing prices in the room — has its own page: cash acceptance and price display.
The daily fiscal report and how it differs from the periodic one
Raport fiskalny dobowy — the daily report that closes the day. It is tied to a day, not to an arbitrary stretch of time. That is what separates it from the periodic report, which covers a chosen period.
§ 6 paragraph 1 point 3 sets the deadline in a way that is easy to follow and easy to break: the daily fiscal report is issued after the end of the day's sales, no later than before the first sale of the next day. A restaurant that opens at noon has the whole morning. A bakery that opens at six has almost nothing.
The periodic report is a different object with a different deadline. § 6 paragraph 1 point 4 requires the monthly report by the 25th day of the month following the month covered. Two documents, two rhythms. Confusing them is why some owners believe they closed the month when they only closed thirty days.
For online tills the same point allows a combined periodic monthly report in place of the ordinary one.
Open tables and the deadline
§ 6 paragraph 2 addresses tills capable of handling more than one transaction at a time — which is every restaurant till worth owning. Before the daily report, all transactions started during the day must be closed. An open tab left running at 2 a.m. is not untidiness: it stands between you and a report you must issue.
The regulation also names the letter designations A to G used for tax rates on the till (§ 6 paragraph 1 point 5). The letters themselves are the till's business. The rates behind them are not printed on this page — they change, and a stale rate here is worse than no rate.
An annulled receipt does not disappear
Paragon fiskalny anulowany — an annulled receipt. The regulation defines it in § 2 point 18 as a fiscal document issued by the till during a sale, confirming that a started sale was not completed.
That definition settles an argument that runs in most kitchens. Annulment does not erase an event. It creates a second document that says the first one did not finish. For tills keeping an electronic or paper copy, § 29 paragraph 1 points 14 and 15 require the daily report to contain the number of annulled receipts and their total value.
So the evening produces a count and a sum, both meaningful. A share that sits flat week after week is a working till and a working shift. A share that jumps on one shift and only that shift is a question about that shift, and you can ask it with a document in hand.
Share of annulled = value of annulled receipts ÷ value of issued receipts, taken over one period, on one till. Both sides are money, so the result is a plain ratio with no dimension. Worked through: 1 240 PLN annulled against 62 000 PLN issued gives 0.02. Whether 0.02 is high for you is not something a page can tell you; whether it doubled since last month is.
Discounts, comps and voids are the management-side view of the same till, and they have their own page: voids, discounts and comps at the till.
Refunds and cashier mistakes in the documents
Here the regulation is unexpectedly specific, and usefully so. § 3 paragraph 2 says plainly that returns of goods and accepted complaints are not entered in the till record. They go into a separate register, and § 3 paragraph 3 lists seven fields that register must contain, point by point:
- the date of the sale;
- the name of the goods or service allowing them to be identified unambiguously, and where useful a description expanding that name;
- the date on which the return or the complaint was made;
- the gross value of the returned goods, or the gross value of the goods or service complained about, together with the amount of tax due, where the whole amount is refunded;
- the amount refunded, gross, with the corresponding amount of tax due, where only part of the amount is refunded;
- the document confirming the sale, and where that document is an electronic receipt or invoice, its number together with the unique till number;
- the protocol of accepting the return or the complaint, signed by seller and buyer, or an internal note, or the protocol of a verification purchase.
Point 7 is the one that gets forgotten in a busy room. A refund with no signed acceptance behind it exists only in your own handwriting, and in a disagreement that is worth as much as a memory.
Obvious mistakes get their own treatment. § 3 paragraphs 4 and 5 require a separate register of them and then require the sale to be recorded again at the correct amount. Not corrected in place — recorded again, with the mistake documented beside it.
That register is specified rather than left to taste. Paragraph 4 requires it to hold the wrongly recorded sale — its gross value and the amount of tax due — together with a short description of the cause and circumstances of the mistake, with the original fiscal receipt attached, or, where the receipt is electronic, its number and the unique till number. The correction is immediate, not part of a monthly tidy-up.
Two registers, two different reasons
The split is not decoration. A refund is a real event in the guest's world: the food went back, the money went back. An obvious mistake is an event in your world only: the cashier hit the wrong key and the guest never knew. One pile makes both unreadable, and it is that pile which later produces an evening discrepancy nobody can explain.
An invoice instead of a receipt
A guest may ask for an invoice, and the timing is written down. Article 106b paragraph 3 of the VAT act gives the buyer that right if the request is made within three months from the end of the month in which the goods were delivered, the service performed, or the payment received.
Article 106b paragraph 5 is the one that ruins evenings when it is not known: an invoice may be issued to a taxable person on the basis of a receipt only if that receipt carries the buyer's tax identification number. If the number was not entered at the moment of sale, the receipt cannot be turned into that invoice afterwards.
The practical consequence is one question asked at the right second: do you need an invoice for a company? Before the sale is recorded it costs nothing; after the receipt is printed it costs an argument.
Article 106i paragraph 1 sets the general deadline for issuing an invoice — no later than the 15th day of the month following the month in which the sale took place. Article 106h paragraph 1 requires that where an invoice relates to a sale recorded on the till, the number of the receipt or the fiscal document and the unique till number are kept in the documentation.
If invoices are a daily event for you rather than a rarity, the mechanical side of it is worth solving once: invoicing automation and KSeF requirements covers what the system has to do so that this stops being a manual task at the counter.
What the norm puts inside an invoice
Article 106e paragraph 1 lists what an invoice must contain. Points 1 to 12 cover the working core: date of issue, sequential number, the parties' names and addresses, the buyer's identification number (point 5), the date of the sale, the name of the goods or service, quantity, unit net price, discounts, net value, the rate, and the amount of tax by rate.
| Feature | Fiscal receipt | Invoice |
|---|---|---|
| When it is created | during the sale, no later than payment | on request, or by the 15th of the next month |
| Buyer identified | only if the number was entered at the time | always, by name and number |
| Turns into the other | only if it carries the buyer's number | no |
| Lives in the daily report | yes | no, it is documented separately |
Where the till total and the books drift apart
Discrepancy of the day = sum of the till's daily reports − revenue for the day in the accounting system. Both figures for the same 24 hours and on the same base: with tax or without, but the same on both sides. Money minus money is money, so the dimension checks out. The trap is the base: if the sides use different bases, the difference is not an error, it is the tax. Name the denominator before you subtract — that is what gross or net in your indicators is for.
| Source | How it looks in the till | How it looks in the books | What closes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refund or accepted complaint | absent from the till record by § 3 paragraph 2 | a reduction on the revenue line | the separate register with its seven fields |
| Obvious mistake, then a re-recording | two records, one annulled | one clean amount | the register of obvious mistakes plus the corrected sale |
| Different bases on the two sides | gross, as printed | net, as posted | naming the denominator once, in writing |
None of these three is a fault; all three are ordinary. The fault is a discrepancy with no line-by-line explanation, and what separates them is whether the evening left documents behind or only memories.
Discrepancy between till and books — the difference between the sum of daily reports and the revenue recorded in the management system for the same day. The number by itself is not a defect. The defect is any line of it you cannot name.
When the till, the accounting system and the stock system each hold a piece of the answer, the work is connecting them rather than reconciling by hand — that is what system integrations and the finance layer are for.
The till report and the management report are two documents about one evening
The daily fiscal report answers a legal question: what was recorded and when. The management report answers yours: what was sold, at what margin, by which shift, against which forecast. Different fields, different readers, not interchangeable.
Treat the fiscal report as your management report and you run a business through a document designed for a tax office. Ignore it and your management numbers cannot be defended. Both documents, every day, is the only stable arrangement.
Where a machine helps and where it is plain arithmetic
The comparison is arithmetic and needs no intelligence: one sum, one subtraction, one list of explanations. What a machine is good at is doing it every morning unasked, keeping the history, and saying when today differs from the last thirty days. Reports that assemble themselves and indicator screens are that, and nothing more mystical.
Which numbers deserve a screen is a separate decision, and a badly chosen screen is worse than none: the numbers an owner actually looks at works through that choice. If the question underneath is which system layer to add next, CRM or ERP is the honest version.
The paperwork that has to exist before the shift starts
Most of what goes wrong at closing time was decided much earlier, on a day when nobody wrote something down. Four things belong to that moment, and none takes long.
The first is the information on the rules of recording. § 6 paragraph 3 requires the taxpayer to acquaint the person who will keep the record, before that person starts and regardless of how the work was entrusted to them, with the basic rules of recording, of issuing and handing over a receipt, and with the consequences of not following them. Paragraph 4 requires that person to give the taxpayer a declaration of having read it. Paragraph 5 says both are drawn up in two identical copies, one for each side, and paragraph 6 puts the template in annex 1 to the regulation.
The second is the reserve till, and it is not paperwork at all but a decision made in advance. Article 111 paragraph 3 of the VAT act says that where recording is impossible for reasons beyond the taxpayer's control, sales are recorded on a reserve till, and where that too is impossible, sales may not be made. A restaurant that never answered what happens if the till dies at seven on a Friday has answered by default, and the default is the door.
The third is the letter assignment. § 6 paragraph 1 point 6 requires it to be presentable on demand, which means it has to exist as a document and not only as the configuration of a machine that will one day be replaced.
The fourth applies whenever somebody else sells on your behalf: a concession in your room, an operator running your bar, a partner taking orders in your name. § 5 requires you either to hand that entity an entrusted till or to oblige it to record sales for you or in your name on its own till, and paragraph 3 requires the arrangement to be made by a written contract. Where the other entity also records its own sales, paragraph 2 has it put the whole value, its own and yours together, through its own till for the purpose of its own figures.
| Document | Where it is required | Who holds it |
|---|---|---|
| Information on the rules of recording | § 6 paragraphs 3, 5 and 6, template in annex 1 | two copies, taxpayer and cashier |
| Declaration of having read it | § 6 paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 | two copies, taxpayer and cashier |
| Assignment of letters to rates or exemption | § 6 paragraph 1 point 6 | taxpayer, presented on demand |
| Written contract on the entrusted till | § 5 paragraph 3 | both parties |
| Mandatory technical inspection at least every 2 years | § 55 paragraphs 1 and 3 | taxpayer |
None of these appears on the daily report or ever shows up as a discrepancy. They show up on the day somebody asks, and nobody schedules that day.
The evening close: the page the shift holds
Everything above turns into a short list one person executes at one time. Written down it survives staff turnover; kept in someone's head it leaves with them.
- Close every transaction started during the day (§ 6 paragraph 2).
- Confirm that every payment taken produced a receipt handed to the guest.
- Move the day's refunds and accepted complaints into their register, with all seven fields.
- Move the day's obvious mistakes into their register, and check the corrected sales were re-recorded.
- Issue the daily fiscal report — after the last sale, and before the first sale tomorrow (§ 6 paragraph 1 point 3).
- Note the count and value of annulled receipts.
- Write the day's discrepancy and one sentence of explanation per line.
Lateness of close = timestamp of the daily report − moment of the last sale of the day. Both moments come from the till itself, never from the shift roster. Time minus time is a duration. A negative value is impossible and means the report was taken before sales ended — a real finding, not a rounding artefact.
Restaurants that already automate reservations, suppliers and reviews have the habit for this; restaurant automation shows what it looks like elsewhere in the same building.
What to look at in the morning
The morning check is short, and its purpose is that yesterday is never reconstructed from memory. Four things: the daily report exists and its timestamp is after the last sale; the annulled count and value are in line with recent weeks; both registers received yesterday's entries; every line of the discrepancy has an explanation.
With more than one location a single screen stops being a luxury: three sites produce three of everything, and comparing by hand is how the habit dies. Managing a chain from one screen covers the shape of that, and end-to-end analytics is the layer underneath.
The revenue that survives all of this becomes something else, and where it lands is the subject of restaurant profit margin. The wider legal entry point for a Polish venue — approval and HACCP — is food safety approval and HACCP.
Frequently asked questions
When must a receipt be issued in a Polish restaurant?
During the sale, no later than the moment payment is accepted, regardless of the form of payment, and without the guest having to ask for it. That is § 6 paragraph 1 point 1 of the regulation on cash registers, and article 111 paragraph 3a point 1 of the VAT act requires issuing and handing the buyer a fiscal receipt or an invoice from every sale. Printing receipts at the end of the shift does not satisfy it.
What is a daily fiscal report and how is it different from a periodic one?
The daily report closes a day and is issued after the end of that day's sales, at the latest before the first sale of the next day. The periodic monthly report covers a month and is due by the 25th day of the following month. Separate documents, separate deadlines: issuing one does not discharge the other.
Does an annulled receipt disappear from the records?
No. The regulation defines an annulled receipt as a fiscal document confirming that a started sale was not completed, so annulment adds a record rather than removing one. On tills keeping an electronic or paper copy, the daily report contains both the number of annulled receipts and their total value.
Can a guest ask for an invoice instead of a receipt?
Yes, if the request is made within three months from the end of the month in which the goods were delivered, the service performed, or the payment received. For a taxable buyer there is a hard condition: the invoice may be issued on the basis of a receipt only where that receipt carries the buyer's tax identification number, entered at the time of sale.
Why do the till total and the management report disagree?
Because they are built from different fields for different readers, and because several ordinary events are recorded on one side and not the other: refunds and accepted complaints go to a separate register, obvious mistakes produce a re-recording, and the two sides may simply be using different bases with and without tax.
What are the three usual sources of an evening discrepancy?
Refunds and accepted complaints, obvious mistakes followed by re-recording, and a mismatch of bases between gross and net. All three are normal parts of a working evening; a difference with no explanation attached to each line is not.
Who should close the day, the shift or the owner?
The shift closes the day: the deadline falls before the next day's first sale and the owner is rarely there at that hour. The owner reads the result in the morning. The other way round puts a legal deadline in the hands of whoever happens to be awake, which is how a close gets missed.
Take one evening, split the discrepancy between till and books line by line, and give each line a name. Every line you cannot name is either somebody else's mistake or a base you never declared. The rest of this section starts at the restaurants hub.