What is a cash count?
A cash count is adding up physical money by denomination: how many hundreds, how many twenties, how many quarters, and what the pile in front of you is worth. This page counts money you type in — not money you feed through a machine. You hold the cash, you tell it how many of each note and coin you have, and the arithmetic happens while you type. That's what a money counter in a browser is: a grid of denominations and one total, with no hopper, no motor and no machine to go find.
It's a job almost everyone hits eventually. A cashier closing a cash drawer at 9pm. A parent emptying a piggy bank onto the kitchen table. A treasurer counting a collection. Four servers splitting a tip jar. A market trader squaring up a float. The counting part is easy — your hands do that. The part that goes wrong is the arithmetic afterwards, because 23 ones plus 18 quarters plus 12 dimes is exactly where a tired brain drops a digit.
Counting by denomination instead of running a total in your head has a second payoff: it can be checked. A bare number can't be audited. "$434.19" tells the next person nothing at all. "Two $100s, six $20s, four $10s, nine $5s, 23 $1s, 18 quarters, 12 dimes, seven nickels and 14 pennies" can be checked against the bag by whoever opens it. That breakdown is a cash count sheet, and it's why every serious cash-handling procedure asks for one rather than a single figure.
How to use the Cash Counter
- Pick your currency at the top. US dollars are the default, and your choice sticks for next time — the counts never do.
- Type how many of each note you're holding in the Bills rows, then do the same for Coins. Each row shows its own subtotal the moment it has a number in it.
- Read the Total. Bills and Coins are broken out underneath, which is the split you need when you're strapping notes and bagging coin separately.
- Closing a till? Open "Counting a till? (optional)" and enter your opening float and the expected total. The deposit and the over/short appear below the two fields.
- Press "Copy count sheet" for a plain-text list of every row you filled in plus the three totals — paste it straight into an email, a note or a spreadsheet. "Clear" empties every quantity for the next drawer.
The Cash Counter has no Calculate button, because there's nothing to wait for. The total appears as soon as the first row has a number in it and updates on every keystroke after that. Changing currency swaps every row instantly with no page reload, and clears your counts along with them — a pile of cash is one currency. Quantities are whole pieces, so a decimal floors to the number below it. There is no half a twenty.
The math behind the total
Total = the sum of (quantity × face value) across every denomination, computed in whole cents.
That's the entire formula, and its simplicity is the point. The work isn't the multiplication, it's keeping nine products straight while somebody asks you a question. Here's a real Friday-night drawer, counted top to bottom.
| Denomination | Quantity | Row subtotal |
|---|---|---|
| $100 | 2 | $200.00 |
| $20 | 6 | $120.00 |
| $10 | 4 | $40.00 |
| $5 | 9 | $45.00 |
| $1 | 23 | $23.00 |
| 25¢ | 18 | $4.50 |
| 10¢ | 12 | $1.20 |
| 5¢ | 7 | $0.35 |
| 1¢ | 14 | $0.14 |
Bills come to $428.00, coins to $6.19, and the total is $434.19 across 95 physical pieces. The coin line is the one nobody wants to do by hand, and it's 36 seconds of typing here.
The "whole cents" part of the formula matters more than it sounds. Computers store 0.1 as a binary approximation, so 0.1 × 3 comes out as 0.30000000000000004, and a money page built on ordinary decimals will occasionally show you a total with fifteen digits after the point. Every figure here is an integer of the minor unit — cents, pence, paise, centavos — and the currency symbol is applied once at the very end. Count three 10c coins and one 20c coin in euros and you get €0.50. Exactly €0.50, every time.
Denominations by currency
Seven currency sets are built in, and switching between them is instant. Each carries only what's in circulation right now.
| Currency | Notes | Coins |
|---|---|---|
| US dollar | $100, $50, $20, $10, $5, $2, $1 | $1, 50¢, 25¢, 10¢, 5¢, 1¢ |
| Euro | €500, €200, €100, €50, €20, €10, €5 | €2, €1, 50c, 20c, 10c, 5c, 2c, 1c |
| British pound | £50, £20, £10, £5 | £2, £1, 50p, 20p, 10p, 5p, 2p, 1p |
| Canadian dollar | $100, $50, $20, $10, $5 | $2, $1, 25¢, 10¢, 5¢ |
| Australian dollar | $100, $50, $20, $10, $5 | $2, $1, 50¢, 20¢, 10¢, 5¢ |
| Indian rupee | ₹500, ₹200, ₹100, ₹50, ₹20, ₹10 | ₹20, ₹10, ₹5, ₹2, ₹1 |
| Brazilian real | R$200, R$100, R$50, R$20, R$10, R$5, R$2 | R$1, 50c, 25c, 10c, 5c |
Look at what's missing. There's no Canadian penny — Canada stopped minting it in 2012 and cash transactions round to the nearest nickel. No Australian 1¢ or 2¢; both were withdrawn in 1992. No ₹2000 note, withdrawn in 2023. No Brazilian 1 centavo, gone since 2005. A lot of money counter pages still ship those rows and advertise it as coverage. A row you can't possibly be holding isn't coverage, it's one more thing to scroll past at closing time.
What a strap and a roll are worth
| US denomination | Pieces per strap or roll | Value |
|---|---|---|
| $100 note | 100 | $10,000 |
| $50 note | 100 | $5,000 |
| $20 note | 100 | $2,000 |
| $10 note | 100 | $1,000 |
| $5 note | 100 | $500 |
| $2 note | 100 | $200 |
| $1 note | 100 | $100 |
| $1 coin | 25 | $25.00 |
| 50¢ coin | 20 | $10.00 |
| 25¢ coin | 40 | $10.00 |
| 10¢ coin | 50 | $5.00 |
| 5¢ coin | 40 | $2.00 |
| 1¢ coin | 50 | $0.50 |
If you're counting money that's already strapped or rolled, multiply the pieces out first and enter the piece count. A strap of twenties is 100 in the $20 row, not 1. The rows here count pieces, not packages, and mixing the two is the single most expensive typo on this page — a strap entered as 1 costs you $1,980.
Closing a till: the deposit and the over/short
A cash drawer count produces two different numbers, and people conflate them constantly. The deposit is what leaves the drawer for the bank: counted cash minus the opening float, because the float stays behind for tomorrow morning. The over/short is an accuracy check: counted cash minus what the till system says should be in there.
Say you count $420.00, you started the shift with a $150.00 float, and the register says $425.00. The deposit is $270.00 and you're Short $5.00. Change the expected figure to $420.00 and it reads Balanced — not "Over $0.00", which is a sentence no shift report should ever contain. A drawer can be perfectly balanced with a large deposit, or $5 short with a $270 deposit. You need the first number for the bank bag and the second for the shift report.
Small variances are usually not theft. The common causes, roughly in order: change given from the wrong denomination, a sale rung as the wrong tender type, a refund processed without the cash actually leaving, tips pulled from the drawer, and plain miscounts on the $1 and $5 stacks. Most shops treat a dollar or two as noise and look for patterns instead — the same register short by a similar amount on the same shifts.
Plenty of point-of-sale contracts bundle a cash-up screen that does this arithmetic, and it's usually reachable only by logging into the terminal, on a per-seat plan, during the hours the terminal is on. The other place you'll find a working counter is buried under fifteen hundred words of payroll-software marketing, with the count sheet parked behind a PDF export and a form. This page is just the cash counter. Count the drawer, copy the sheet, close up.
Where a cash count goes wrong
The tool is deliberately unforgiving about a few things. Typing 0 into a row is the same as leaving it empty, so no phantom $0.00 rows appear on your count sheet. A negative quantity is ignored rather than subtracted — you can't hold minus three twenties. A decimal floors. Pasting text that isn't a number keeps whatever digits it contains and drops the rest, so a stray character never produces NaN on screen. And changing currency clears everything, on purpose: one pile, one currency, no half-converted totals.
What it can't do is check the money. It won't spot a counterfeit, won't tell you a card sale was rung as cash, and won't know your employer's policy on variance. At volume — thousands of notes a day — a counting machine is genuinely faster, and a browser cash counter isn't competing with one. For a single drawer, finding the machine takes longer than typing the count.
If your numbers aren't matching, here's what to try first. Recount the $1 and $5 stacks; they're thin, numerous, and responsible for most variances. Check that your float went in the float field rather than being subtracted in your head. Confirm the expected total came from the shift you're actually closing. Then count in one direction, largest to smallest, without backtracking — the value of a denomination breakdown is that you can recheck one row instead of starting the whole drawer again.
Related calculations
A drawer rarely gets counted in isolation. If you're working out what a sale should have added to it, the sales tax calculator gets you from a pre-tax price to the amount actually tendered, and the reverse sales tax calculator runs it the other way when all you have is the total on the receipt.
For the front-of-house side of the same shift: the tip calculator handles splitting a tip jar or a bill between people, and the discount calculator works out what a marked-down item should have rung up as. When the question is a pure ratio — "the drawer is short $2.81 on $434.19, how bad is that?" — the percentage calculator answers it in one line. That one's 0.65%, well inside what most shops call noise.
All of them work the same way this one does: open the page, do the thing, close the tab. No account, no trial clock, nothing bundled into a contract. And 10% of every dollar Microapp earns goes to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to press anything to get the total?
No. The total updates on every keystroke and appears the moment one row has a quantity in it. Changing currency is instant too — no page reload, no form submission. Three of the five comparable tools on the first page of Google still make you press Calculate, and the one ranking first reloads the entire page just to switch from dollars to euros.
What should I do if the drawer comes up short?
Don't panic and don't start over. Recount the $1 and $5 rows first — they cause most variances. Check your float went into the float field rather than being subtracted mentally, and that the expected total belongs to the shift you're closing. If it's still out by a dollar or two, note it on the shift report and move on; that's within the range most retailers treat as ordinary. A real problem looks like a pattern across shifts, not one odd night.
Should two people count the same drawer?
For anything above a few hundred dollars, yes, and the second count should be blind — the second person counts without seeing the first person's sheet, then the two sheets get compared. Handing someone your numbers and asking them to verify tends to produce agreement rather than a check. A denomination breakdown makes the comparison quick: you're looking for the one row where the sheets differ.
Can I count two currencies at once?
No, and that's deliberate. Each count is one currency, which is why switching sets clears the quantities. Count and record each pile separately. This is a money counter, not a currency converter — it never applies an exchange rate to anything, so the number you read is the face value of what's in your hand.
Does the total round anything?
Nothing rounds and nothing drifts. All arithmetic runs in whole cents as integers, so the coin rows are exact no matter how many you add. Three 10c coins plus one 20c coin is €0.50, not €0.5000000000000001. The currency symbol and the thousands separators are applied once at the end, which is why a count of 12,845 hundreds renders as $1,284,500.00 rather than scientific notation.
How often should a till be counted?
At every change of hands, at minimum: opening, each shift change, and close. The whole value of counting a cash drawer is being able to say which shift a discrepancy belongs to, and a drawer counted once a day can only tell you the day. Many shops add a mid-shift skim count when the drawer gets heavy, largely so there isn't $2,000 sitting in a register at 4pm.
Is the cash counter free, and do I need an account?
It's free and there's no account. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole count runs in your browser, and closing the tab clears it, which is what you want on a shared back-office machine. The only thing that persists is your currency choice, stored in your own browser so you don't pick it again tomorrow. The quantities are never saved.