"Open a cash drawer shift" when I try to take payment

The message is:

Open a cash drawer / register shift before taking payments.

It appears when the restaurant has day close in its plan, because from that point every tender — cash and card — has to attach to an open shift. That is the whole point: a day report that balances needs every payment to belong to a named person at a named till.

The fix, in order

1. Open a shift on this device. Cash drawer for a till, waiter bank for a personal float. See Drawer shifts, floats and safe drops.
2. Check it is your shift. A shift belongs to one person on one device. A colleague’s open shift on the same tablet does not count as yours.
3. Check your role may open one. order_taker — shown as Waiter — may open a personal float only, never a till. And the owner may open neither, by design: see Who can do what with cash.
4. Check the venue allows that shift type. The banking mode (cashier, server or hybrid) decides which shift types exist at all.

The cause you cannot fix on the device

If two people are signed in as the same account on two devices, this error will keep coming back whatever you do at the till, because the shift exists — on the other device.

A cash shift is scoped to one user on one device. A shared login across two devices produces exactly this error, and no amount of opening and closing shifts clears it.

Give each person their own login

This is not a licensing rule. It is the only way the audit trail can name who had the drawer open. Fix it in Team by giving each member of staff their own login and one role, then try the payment again. See One login per person.

Still stuck mid-service

Take the payment as cash on a device that does have an open shift, finish serving, and sort the logins out afterwards. Do not hand round one login to get through the night — that is how a day ends up with a variance nobody can explain.