Complete Story
10/21/2025
Question from Lucas Co Treasurer Webb
With the U.S. Treasury announcement that pennies will soon be phased out, what should our policy be for cash transaction rounding and electronic and/or check transactions?
Things to consider:
- Cash transactions may need to be rounded to the nearest five cents.
- Point of sale systems and accounting software may need updates.
- Electronic transactions (credit, debit, online) are not rounded? Or be consistent and round all things to $0.05?
- You may need to post signage to inform customers of your rounding method.
- Staff may need training or guidance to handle cash rounding changes.
How are other counties handling this situation?
Thank you,
Lindsay Webb, Lucas Co Treasurer
1 Comment
John Howley on Wednesday 10/29/2025 at 11:48 AM
We had a brief discussion about this in our office. While we feel it will be several cycles before this really becomes an issue, the thought was that it would be a situation where we would require exact change for a cash payment. Otherwise, every cash payment would be rounded up to the next nickel, and the extra pennies would be treated like an overpayment. So they would have one to four cents sitting in refunds and applied to the next payment. Checks and credit card payments would continue as the exact amount. In theory, that seemed to be a workable solution.
