Key difference: Cashier is the term used to describe a person who collects cash as part of a business transaction that is purchase/sale of goods and services. Bookkeeper is a term used to describe a person who maintains a written record of every business transaction that is purchase/sale of goods and services.

Cashier is the term used to describe a person who collects cash as part of a business transaction that is purchase/sale of goods and services. There is usually a substantial requirement of cashiers in big retail stores such as shopping malls. A shopping mall cashier collects the cash from the customer for the purchased items.  Cashier produces a bill for the purchased items and returns the change for the balance amount. The change is returned in a case where the amount given by the customer to the cashier is more than the bill amount.

Some of the other kinds of companies where a cashier is required are Banks, Telecom companies and Power generation companies. The role of the cashier varies with every type of company, but more or less it revolves around collecting and returning money. In a bank, the setup is a bit different because customers visit a bank to deposit their cash or withdraw cash by issuing a check. In case of telecom and power generation companies, the customers give the cashier money to pay their dues of electricity and telephone usage bills. In this case, also the cashier’s job is similar to the cashier job in a big retail store. The activity is the same that is collecting cash from the customers as payments on products/services and returning the change or balance amount, if required.

The bookkeeper’s job is to update the cash register and tally it either monthly/quarterly/yearly. The cash register contains the transactions conducted by the cashier as part of the company business. And as mentioned earlier, these transactions are receiving, returning and paying cash to the customers, suppliers and other stakeholders of the business.

The bookkeeper maintains a record of the cashier’s activities that are:

• Collection of cash from the customer for products/services produced by the company
• Payment of cash to the suppliers and manufacturers for products/services  purchased/used by the company
• In case of banks, the cashier receives or returns money for depositing it or remitting it in the customers bank account

The role of bookkeepers and cashiers is observed earlier in this article. There are two ways in completing the cashier and bookkeeper job. One way is to do it manually and the other is to automate the whole process. In shopping malls, the process is automated to complete the transactions at a faster rate. The cashier in a retail store scans the barcode of the product and once all the codes are scanned through the system then the total bill amount of the purchase is directly displayed on the computer screen. In this case, the bookkeeping process is automated and an additional bookkeeper is not required to complete the transaction recording activity. These days nobody does the business manually even small restaurants are billing their customers with the aid of a software system. The bill is issued, cash is received and at the same time a record is maintained in the computer and this means bookkeeping is done by the cashier at the same time.

In conclusion, it is observed that the job of a cashier is to collect and pay cash for various business transactions such as purchase, sale, and loan repayment whereas, the job of the bookkeeper is to maintain a record of all these business transactions in the cash register. This allows the bookkeeper to tally the total of all business transactions such as money paid, received, collected and returned back. The bookkeeper’s job of recording the transactions is conducted on a daily basis and the job of matching the total of various transaction amounts is done periodically as per the stipulated time. In accountancy terms the matching process is also called as tallying and a software known as tally can be used to automate this process. 

Image Courtesy: workvocabulary.com, moncton-accountant-john-whiteley.abusiness.ca