The drawer opens at eleven in the morning and closes at midnight. Three cashiers work it across that span. At close-out it is £40 short.
The shortfall is discussed with the cashier who closed, because they are the one standing there. They did not take the money and cannot prove it, and there is no way to establish which of the thirteen hours it went missing in.
The structural problem is that the drawer had one envelope and three operators. Shift changes happened by somebody walking away and somebody else starting, with no count in between — because counting means closing, and closing at six in the evening is impossible with bills open across the floor.
A hand-over is a different verb from a close for exactly this reason. The session stays open as the day's envelope; the operator change is its own recorded event with its own count. Open bills deliberately do not block it — that is the entire point.
Any variance is then attributed permanently to the outgoing operator's segment and neutralised immediately, so it cannot drift down the day onto somebody who was not there. Approval is inline: a manager stands at the terminal, because once the cashier has walked away the money is in somebody's hands and the count can no longer be re-observed.
Why this matters to you: unattributable cash variance is corrosive out of all proportion to its size. It makes honest staff feel suspected, it makes dishonest staff feel safe, and it is entirely a consequence of counting once at the end of a thirteen-hour day.