COD and cash management
Cash on delivery is money moving through your business, so it is tracked like money: held by a named driver, counted in at a hub, matched against the shipment, and paid out to the merchant on a schedule they can see.
COD reconciliation is the process of matching the cash a delivery operator actually collected against the cash it was supposed to collect, then paying the difference to the merchant after charges. It involves four checks: what the driver collected, what the hub counted in, what the carrier reports it remitted, and what the merchant is owed once shipping charges, COD fees and returns are deducted.
Every amount a driver collects is posted against the shipment and against that driver, so what they are holding is a running figure rather than a guess at the end of a shift. A driver cannot deposit more than they hold, and the ledger is append only, so a correction is a new entry and never a quiet edit.
Replaces: A notebook, and a count that only happens when something looks wrong.
When a driver hands cash to a cashier, both sides get a record of what moved and when. A shortfall shows up against the driver and the day it happened, rather than surfacing weeks later as an unexplained gap in a monthly total.
Replaces: A signature on a printed sheet that nobody can find in March.
Import the file a carrier sends and every row is matched by waybill against what you expected. Amounts that agree are cleared, amounts that differ are flagged with the gap, waybills you do not recognise are listed, and waybills the carrier has not paid yet are counted as still owed rather than quietly dropped.
Replaces: Two spreadsheets side by side and a lookup formula that breaks.
Payouts run on a cycle you set, and nothing pays out until a second person approves it. The merchant statement lists every deduction on its own line with the reason and the shipment it came from, so the gap between what was collected and what is paid is never a lump sum.
Replaces: A bank transfer and a WhatsApp message saying trust me.
A customer who pays part of the amount, one who refuses at the door and a parcel that goes back to origin are three different events, and each moves the money differently. A return reverses the cash, so a merchant statement never shows money that did not arrive.
Replaces: A note in a column called comments.
The driver marks the amount taken, in cash or by card, against that shipment.
It joins what that driver is holding, and it stays visible until the driver hands it over.
The cashier counts it in and both sides get a receipt, so a shortfall is caught the same day.
What the carrier says it collected is matched against what you expected, and any gap is flagged.
Charges come off, the payout goes out on the agreed cycle, and the merchant sees every deduction and why.
The cash track
And when the money does not arrive
Nothing is collected. The shipment carries the reason and goes to the returns queue.
The gap between what was due and what was taken is recorded against the shipment and the driver.
The parcel comes back and the cash reverses, so the merchant statement never shows money that never arrived.
Each of these exports, so the version you send to a merchant or an auditor is the same one you are looking at.
Run a week of deliveries through it and close the cash on Friday. Or walk through your current reconciliation with someone and see where it would have caught something.
