Ask Your Books: Daily Takings in Telegram
Send /total in the group your bank alerts already land in, and get back what reached the bank, what you sold, and the gap between them — without opening a laptop.
Why ask the bot at all?
The question owners actually ask at the end of a shift is not “how much did we take”. It is “does what reached the bank match what we sold?”
Answering that normally means two places at once: the bank app for the deposits, the POS for the sales, and holding both numbers in your head long enough to compare them. It is the kind of check that gets skipped on a busy night — and skipped checks are how a week of small gaps becomes a month-end you cannot explain.
So /total does not report a total. It reports both sides and the difference, in the group where your bank notifications already arrive. If the two sides agree, that is a two-second glance. If they do not, you find out tonight rather than at month-end.
What the reply tells you
Four lines, and a warning when one is needed.
- Received (bank) — Every bank receipt captured for the period — KHQR and transfers — with the count beside it. This is money that actually landed.
- Sales (net) — What the POS recorded, attributed to the day each sale was paid. A table opened before midnight and settled the next morning counts on the morning, which is how the bank sees it too.
- Delivery — Sales settled through a delivery platform, which arrive later as a payout rather than into the drawer. Shown only when there are any.
- Expected cash — Sales minus bank minus delivery — what the drawer should be holding. The number to count against before you close up.
- Still unmatched — Receipts that arrived but that no sale has claimed yet. This is the early warning: a gap that is one receipt tonight is a reconciliation problem in three weeks.
Asking for another day
The reply carries buttons for the common periods — Today, Yesterday, This week, This month — so most of the time there is nothing to type. Tapping one rewrites the same message rather than adding another to the group.
For anything else, type the day or the range:
- /total — today
- /total yesterday
- /total week — Monday to today
- /total month — the 1st to today
- /total 2026-09-15 — one specific day
- /total 2026-09-01 2026-09-15 — a range, both ends included
Days follow your organisation's timezone, not the server's — so “today” means today where the business is, including during the early morning when a UTC clock would still say yesterday.
What you need
Nothing to install, and no new group to create if you already capture bank receipts.
- A Pro workspace — /total reads captured bank receipts, which is a Pro feature. On the free plan the bot says so rather than showing a row of zeros, because a free workspace captures no receipts at all.
- A linked chat — Either a bank-feed group registered under Settings → Integrations, or the chat set under Settings → Notifications. If your bank alerts already arrive somewhere, that group works as-is.
- No setup beyond that — The command appears in the bot's menu. Send it in the group and it answers — anyone who can see the group can ask, which is the same visibility they already have over every individual receipt.
When it doesn't answer
Three things account for almost every case.
- “This chat isn't linked to a workspace” — The group is not registered. Send /chatid there and paste the ID into Settings → Integrations (for a bank feed) or Settings → Notifications.
- “Linked to more than one workspace” — Two organisations have claimed the same chat. The bot refuses rather than guessing, because guessing would show one business's takings to another. Unlink it from all but one and ask again.
- The buttons do nothing — The bot's webhook has to be subscribed to button presses, which is a setting held on Telegram's side rather than in the app. Re-running the bot setup applies it.