As pennies disappear from circulation, retailers are left with a practical question: What actually happens at the register when a customer pays with cash?
The end of penny production has created confusion around rounding — what’s required, what’s allowed, and what might quietly impact pricing, margins, or reporting.
Below, we answer the most common retailer questions about penny production changes, followed by how FieldStack handles cash transactions without altering the sale.
Short answer: No.
With FieldStack, shelf prices, line items, discounts, and taxes remain unchanged. Every transaction total is calculated exactly as it always has been — down to the cent.
There’s no repricing, no tax adjustment, and no rounding baked into the sale itself.
Rounding only happens at the final step of a cash transaction — when determining how much change to give back.
The sale total stays exact. The rounding applies only to the physical cash exchanged.
This approach is commonly referred to as change rounding or cash rounding.
Here’s what that looks like at the register:
The transaction total is never altered — only the change returned.
Not at all.
If a customer pays part of the transaction with a card and the remainder with cash, FieldStack simply rounds the remaining change.
There are no weird edge cases, no special rules, and no reconciliation headaches.
Nope — and this is where design matters!
Because rounding occurs after the transaction total is calculated, reporting, accounting, and analytics remain consistent.
Unified commerce ensures that the rounding event is reflected cleanly everywhere, without manual adjustments or downstream patchwork.
Our opinion on the penny problem? It’s absolutely manageable. Retailers just need to start thinking now about how they’ll handle it. Because there’s more to it than just rounding correctly. Of course, we recommend using a modern retail system to help with the transactions themselves, but it’s also about your approach. Here’s what we suggest..
Based on early FieldStack data across multiple retail verticals, rounding change in the customer’s favor shows consistently positive outcomes:
Importantly, this approach does not impact item margins or violate cash/credit pricing rules, because the sale itself is unchanged.
“For most verticals, we recommend rounding the change in the customer’s favor because it preserves pricing integrity and improves the cash experience. You’re not altering the sale — you’re just removing friction at the very end of the transaction. In our early data, that small gesture correlates with higher customer comfort and repeat visits.”
— Brett Wickard, FieldStack CEO
Yes.
FieldStack supports location-level control over rounding behavior, recognizing that state regulations, customer expectations, and competitive environments differ (and are subject to change in the future!).
Because everything runs on a unified transaction model, this flexibility doesn’t fragment reporting or analytics.
Penny rounding isn’t about squeezing extra cents out of transactions.
It’s about handling cash gracefully — without breaking trust, compliance, or data integrity.
By rounding change rather than the sale, FieldStack gives retailers a simple, customer-friendly way to adapt to a penny-less world while keeping pricing, reporting, and operations exactly as they should be.
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