It's the last week of the school term. A queue of parents, each buying a voucher for a teacher. Then it's December, and the same thing happens for a fortnight straight - vouchers, vouchers, vouchers.

The till rings up a lovely number. The bank balance looks great.

But here's the honest question: how much of that money is actually yours yet?

Most of it isn't. Not on the day you take it. A voucher is a promise to hand over cake and coffee at some point in the future. Until the customer redeems it, you're holding their money for a product you haven't made.

That doesn't make vouchers a bad thing. Quite the opposite. Vouchers are one of the few genuinely good deals a café gets handed for free. The trick is enjoying the cash flow without kidding yourself it's profit before it's earned.

Why vouchers are quietly brilliant for a café

Strip away the accounting for a second. From a pure business point of view, a voucher does two lovely things.

It's interest-free working capital. The customer pays you today. You deliver weeks or months later, sometimes never. In the meantime you're holding their cash. No bank would lend you that money interest-free, but your customers do it gladly, and they thank you for the opportunity.

Some of it never comes back to bite you. A percentage of vouchers are never redeemed. That unredeemed value is called breakage, and once a voucher properly expires, that money is yours to keep. It becomes profit at almost 100% margin, because you never had to make anything for it.

For a busy café, vouchers smooth out cash flow and hand you a small but real profit stream you barely have to lift a finger for. The catch is that the cash arriving early can fool you into spending money you haven't actually earned. More on that below.

My own café: cake sells a lot of vouchers

I'll be honest about how this plays out at Hunters Cake Company, because the numbers are real and they surprised me when I first sat down and worked them out.

Being cake-led, we sell a lot of vouchers. Cake is the classic thank-you. It's the present you buy when you can't think what else to get someone, and it's never the wrong choice. So we get a steady stream of people buying vouchers as gifts: birthdays, new babies, thank-yous, "sorry your dog died" cakes, the lot.

The end of the school year is the big one. I'm pretty sure every teacher in the surrounding area gets at least one voucher from us at the end of the school year. Parents club together, or just grab one each on the way past. For a fortnight in July the till is full of voucher sales.

Then there's the breakage. We find about 20% of our gift vouchers never get redeemed. People mean to use them. They tuck them in a drawer, or a wallet, or behind the bread bin, and life happens. We give a long 3-year expiry date, but when they expire we write them off as income - so that 20% is straight profit.

That's the part operators miss. A cake-led or bakery-led café is unusually well suited to vouchers precisely because cake is a gift purchase. Your voucher volume is high, your gift-buyer often isn't the person who'll redeem it, and so your breakage is real money, not a rounding error.

The honest bit: voucher money is a liability, not turnover

Here's where a lot of café owners trip up, and it's an easy mistake to make.

When you sell a £20 voucher, that £20 is not turnover. Not yet. In accounting terms it's a liability - money you owe the customer in goods. You'll see it called deferred income, or unearned income. It sits on your balance sheet as something you owe, not on your P&L as something you earned.

Turnover only happens when the voucher is redeemed and you actually hand over the coffee and cake. That's the moment you've earned the money, because that's the moment you've delivered the thing.

Why does this matter when the cash is sitting in your bank either way? Because if you treat voucher sales as profit on day one, you'll overstate how well the business is doing, and you'll be tempted to spend money you haven't earned. A big voucher month in December feels like a brilliant trading month. Some of it is just borrowed against January and February.

A simple worked example

Let's keep it round and easy.

Say over December you sell £5,000 of vouchers.

On the day, that's £5,000 of cash in the bank. Brilliant. But in your accounts, on day one, that's:

Cash: +£5,000
Turnover: £0
Liability (vouchers owed): £5,000

Now roll forward. Over the following months, customers redeem £4,000 of those vouchers. Each redemption is the moment you recognise the turnover and reduce the liability:

Turnover recognised: £4,000 (as the cake and coffee actually goes out)
Liability remaining: £1,000

That remaining £1,000 is the 20% that, in my experience, never gets redeemed. After three years it hits its expiry date. At that point you release the liability to income:

Breakage income: £1,000
Liability remaining: £0

That £1,000 is straight profit. You never made anything for it, so there's almost no cost attached. That's the prize, and it's why a clear expiry policy actually matters - without one, you can never cleanly recognise the breakage, and that profit just sits as a liability forever.

What about VAT?

Keep this light, and check the specifics with your accountant, because voucher VAT has caught plenty of people out.

A typical café voucher is what's called a multi-purpose voucher. That's because it can be redeemed against a mix of things at different VAT rates - a sit-in coffee (standard-rated), a takeaway loaf (zero-rated), a slice of cake to eat in (standard-rated). At the point of sale, you genuinely don't know what mix the customer will spend it on.

Because of that, VAT on a multi-purpose voucher is generally accounted for at redemption, not at sale. You don't charge VAT when you sell the voucher. You account for it when the customer spends it, based on what they actually buy.

For breakage, when an unredeemed voucher expires and you take that value to income, the VAT is treated appropriately at that point too - and again, this is exactly the kind of thing worth a five-minute conversation with your accountant rather than a guess.

This sits alongside the broader VAT picture for cafés, which is its own tangle. If you've not got your head fully around it, the complete guide to VAT on food and drink for UK cafés is worth a read before you fine-tune anything.

Practical tips for running vouchers well

None of this is hard, but a few habits make the difference between vouchers being a quiet profit stream and being a mess you dread reconciling.

Set a sensible expiry. We use three years. Long enough that customers feel it's fair and generous, short enough that breakage actually crystallises into income within a reasonable timeframe. An indefinite voucher is a liability that never goes away, which helps nobody.

Make them genuinely easy to buy. This is the biggest lever, especially around the seasonal spikes - Christmas, end of the school year, Mother's Day, Valentine's. Have physical vouchers ready by the till, sell them online if you can, and make sure every member of staff knows how to ring one up without faffing. Friction at the point of sale is lost voucher sales.

Track your outstanding voucher liability. Keep a running figure for the total value of vouchers sold but not yet redeemed. A big redemption month shouldn't surprise you. If you've sold thousands over Christmas, you want to know roughly how much of that is still out there waiting to be spent against your kitchen.

Plan for the cash-flow timing. This is the one people feel in January. Vouchers sold in December get redeemed in January and February. You bank the cash in December, but you deliver the product - and incur the actual ingredient and labour cost - weeks later, in your quietest trading months. That's a timing mismatch worth seeing coming. A rolling 13-week cash-flow forecast is exactly the tool for making sure a strong voucher December doesn't paper over a thin January.

Where Brikly Fits

I'll be honest about the boundaries here, because vouchers mostly live in your till.

The actual selling and redeeming of vouchers usually sits in your EPOS or till system. That's where a voucher gets issued, where the balance lives, and where redemption gets recorded. Brikly doesn't replace that, and I'd be wary of any tool that claimed to.

Where Brikly helps is one step up, in the financial picture. PulseBrik pulls your numbers into a clear financial view, so you can see your outstanding voucher liability sitting where it belongs - as money owed, not money earned - and watch the cash-flow timing as a strong voucher month feeds into a quieter trading one. It's the difference between knowing you had a great December and understanding how much of that December is really January's.

That's the modest, honest version: your till handles the vouchers, Brikly helps you read what they mean for your cash and your margin.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.