Decrease Theft with Cash Accountability
Cash accountability is one of the things that sometimes gets a little overlooked when people are looking for a POS system. It’s one of the key components of any good point of sale however.
What we want to do is keep the employees honest when it comes to handling the cash.
It all starts by deciding who has access to the cash in the drawers throughout the day.
First we can ask ourselves some questions about the cash drawer in the store:
Can anyone access and handle the cash? Is the key left in the drawer?
Is there a cashier that is dedicated to handling the cash each shift?
The heart of the problem for most stores is that there are just too many people with hands in the drawer. When the drawer is short at the end of the night – who do you question?
In order to be a little more accurate we must first really lock down the drawer. Take the key away and assign the drawer to an employee. Make it their responsibility. This helps insure employee accountability because only that employee can access the cash. The only issue here is that the cashier may not always be available when a customer arrives and is ready to order. We solve this by:
Setting the system up to allow only the employee assigned to close out the drawer. All other employees can start a ticket but only one employee can cash out the customer.
We can also setup multiple cash drawers per order taking terminal. We support up to five but two is probably enough. In this case you assign each employee to their own drawer. Then you know which employee is short and why.
With either method, you will be on your way to eliminating the potential for shortages in your drawer and increasing employee accountability.
MobileAlerts & Theft control
Are you using our MobileDash feature? If so, you have probably started to use the MobileAlerts feature as well.
One of the key parts of the MobileAlerts is the void and audit tracking. I thought it would be fun to explore this further in a blog. Note that all of the void and edited ticket examples assume that the employee has the security to actually perform the action. If you lock them out, then there is no way for them to even do this.
The first example and scenario is that an employee completed a ticket and then re-opened it and voided that same ticket. In this example, we see that the ticekt was re-opened at 10:44am by John Smith on workstation one. The ticket was then voided by John as well. We can see that they voided the entire ticket, that it originally had 13 line items (not menu items) and that the price was originally $9.24.
Date: 1/25/12 Time:10:44a
Ticket:0004 Carry-Out (VOIDED)
Void: 10:44a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Re-Opened: 10:44a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Items: Current:0 Original:13
SubTotal: Current: Original: 9.24
Tax: Current: Original:
Total: Current: Original:
This next example shows an employee that has re-opened a ticket and then deleted an item off. John Smith re-opened the ticket and reduced the total sales amount at 10:43 on workstation one. The original ticket had 16 items and a total balance of $10.71. After the reduction, the ticket has 7 items and $5.48 as the total balance.
Date: 1/25/12 Time:10:43a
Ticket:0003 Carry-Out
Reduction: 10:43a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Re-Opened: 10:43a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Items: Current:7 Original:16
SubTotal: Current: 5.00 Original: 9.75
Tax: Current: .48 Original: .96
Total: Current: 5.48 Original: 10.71
This final example shows that the employee has changed the price of an item (most likely through size). John Smith (boy ,he is a troublemaker) opened the ticket at 10:43 on workstation one and changed something that resulted in the price dropping from $10.10 to $9.28. The number of items (14) stayed the same so we know that he either deleted an item and replaced it with a lower cost item or changed the item directly to a lower cost item.
Date: 1/25/12 Time:10:43a
Ticket:0002 Carry-Out
Reduction: 10:43a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Re-Opened: 10:43a 9999 SMITH, JOHN WS:1
Items: Current:14 Original:14
SubTotal: Current: 8.45 Original: 9.20
Tax: Current: .83 Original: .90
Total: Current: 9.28 Original: 10.10
So there you have it. Three ways to read the MobileAlert information coming to your cell phone!
Posted in Order Entry, Reporting, theft Tagged with: employee, mobile alerts, reporting, Theft
5 Ways to Help Eliminate Theft in Your Store!
1) Don’t leave cash in the drawers! Those signs you see stating that no cash is left on the premises are there to help discourage break ins. Make sure your staff knows that you don’t keep cash on hand as well.
2) At the end of the night, make sure that potential thieves can see that your cash drawer is empty. Leave the drawer open and set the inserts on top of the counter. This lets people walking by see that you have nothing in the drawers. Seriously, we sell a few replacement drawers a month because thieves rip the drawers out.
3) When handling cash, make sure that the bill the customer hands you is not put in the drawer until the change has been handed back. There are a number of scams involving money exchanges (as well as legitimate mistakes). Doing this will help eliminate the potential for confusion regarding what bill was handed to you. If you have a camera system at the register or POS station, then make sure it captures the denomination of the bill as well.
4) Use the POS for counting back change. I know we all joke that kids today can’t count back change but this is important. If the employees enter the tendered amount onto the POS screen then you will see less mistakes and confusion on the change going back to the customer.
5) Watch where employees store their personal items. Employees should not have easy access to jackets or purses right next to product. It’s just too tempting for some people to slip product into their jacket when leaving the store.
Posted in Employees, Hardware, theft Tagged with: cash drawers, employee, Theft
4 Employee management features in SP-1
Employee management is a subject that comes up often when talking about SP-1 as a Point Of Sale. SP-1 has a number of ways to help you stay on top of your employees. . .
Let’s start with the basics. Each employee can be assigned an individual number and then clock in and out. This can be done by a code and password, swipe card or even fingerprint id. It all depends on the amount of security you need.
Every ticket created logs the employee who started it. That’s right, every ticket shows the employee code used to start it. This gives you the instant ability to ask the right employee about tickets. By the way, that’s also recorded on the end of day reports and in our audit tracking.
Assigning security levels. Because each employee is a unique number you can have managers and employees that have different security levels. This also allows you to create different responsibility levels based on the employee and not an arbitrary number.
Assigning cash drawers. Employees can be assigned to cash drawers. This allows you to better manage accountability and watch cash.
Posted in Employees, Uncategorized Tagged with: employee
Time Keeping Reports
In this blog, I’ll continue to take a look at some of the reporting features in SP-1. This time, we will look at some of the Time Keeping reports that are built in.
There are four key reports for the employee time keeping.
Time Period for Employee: This report will provide you with the hours worked and wage earned for one employee. Typically this would be run when an employee is released or special payroll circumstances. This report shows you the details of each clock-in and clock out period, the wage, hours worked and any overtime.
Time Period For All Employees: This is very similar to the above but it runs for all the employees you have clock in / out periods for. Additionally, this report will allow you to run a summary version that shows you just the total hours and wage for a quick reference. This is the report that you will typically run for your payroll period.
Employee Listing: This report will show you a simple list of all employees and their contact information.
Job Classifications: If you pay employees different wages based on the job that they clock in with. This gives you a great way to see where your payroll dollars are going.
As usual, there are a number of different ways to show this data. Also, there are some specific switches that determine how these reports (and others) function. Don’t hesitate to contact us for more details!
Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Employees, Reporting, Uncategorized Tagged with: employee, reports, time keeping
Employee Passwords and System Security
- Must be 7 characters or more.
- Must contain a combination of numbers and letters
- Must expire every 90 days.
- Will not allow for the same password to be used within last 4 times.
- SHA-512 Cryptographic Hash system for password security. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_hash_functions
- Employee lock outs after multiple failed attempts
Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Employees, theft, Uncategorized Tagged with: employee, security, Theft
Cutting delivery insurance costs!
Recently, I had a conversation with a customer about his delivery drivers. He explained to me how his insurance company bills him based on the payroll hours of his employees.
The insurance company bills insurance for employees at $2 per $100 in payroll for kitchen prep and servers and then $7 per $100 for delivery drivers.
The issue that he had (last year and this year) is that the $7 figure on drivers is based on the clock in and out time. Realistically, the higher insurance rate should only be based on the time the drivers are actually on the road and not based on the rest of the time when they are working inside!
So, the question was posed . . . How could we help?
It turns out, quite a bit! Utilizing our XML Ticket export in SP-1, we were able to gather some important data for the insurance company as well as some statistics to help understand delivery. Over the last year they have had:
A total of almost 7,000 deliveries
Total time on the road – 2,830 hours
Average time of 24 minutes per run
The most important figure was the 2830 hours on the road. This allowed the customer to show the insurance company that the rest of the payroll for these employees was in house and not on the road.
This resulted in a savings of $5 for every $100 in driver payroll. The grand total in savings?
So, if you deliver and are curious about what you might be able to save, call us!
Contact us at:
SelbySoft , Inc
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Delivery, Reporting, Uncategorized Tagged with: delivery, employee, insurance, reporting
Cash Drawers, Theft and Accountability
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Do you allow anyone in the store to handle the cash?
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Do you have a dedicated cashier that must ring up every order?
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Do you have a couple people that you trust?
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Set your system to allow anyone to start a ticket but only the approved employee code to close out a ticket. This provides you with the flexibility of having every employee being able to start an order (and then place it on hold) but only having one employee cash that customer out.
- Use multiple cash drawers. SP-1 allows up to five cash drawers per station! With this, you are actually assigning 1-5 employees to their own drawers. If employee one takes an order, drawer one opens, employee two takes an order and drawer two opens.
Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
http://www.selbysoft.com/
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Employees, Hardware, theft Tagged with: cash drawer, employee, Theft
Employee Time Printing
Do your employees bug you about the time that they work? We have a feature that will allow your employees to see how many hours they worked each time they clock out.
So, when an employee clocks out SP-1 will print a receipt with the clock in, clock out and total hours worked as a receipt for the employee!
This option can be found in System Setup, Operations:1 and then select Print Employee Hours Summary on Clock Out.
Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Employees, Reporting, Uncategorized Tagged with: employee, printing, reporting
Audit Tracking
Theft – It’s a fact that it happens in your store. It happens in everyones store. Over the years I have seen a ton of methods that employees and managers will use to steal / give away product.
Recently in Washington State a fine dining restaurant found out that an employee was using a managers code to void cash transactions. This employee wound up stealing over $30,000 over three years through this method. Think about that – $30k. Now, even if it is only $1k that is still unacceptable!
So, this brings us to the question of audit tracking. Are you using your balance till, employee summary, business summay and audit reports? If not, you should be. These are the best ways to see the ‘red flags’ that we all know about and to catch what is happening.
Remember that we show re-opened tickets on the Balance Till – this shows which tickets have been re-opened and which code was used. A good start as to what is going on.
Employee Summary – Run this periodically over a timeframe. This will show voids by employee. If one employee has a larger percent of voids as opposed to another then there is something going on. Either that person needs re-training or they are doing something funny.
Business summary – each and every day, look at the total number of voids and edited voids. This will show you a total dollar amount that you will be responsible for.
Audit reports – This is the absolute best report to run. Remember that this report is not stored inside SP-1 so it is not accessible to the normal employee. This will show you every ticket that has been changed or voided along with who did it, when it was done etc.
Please take a look at these on a regular basis! This does not have to be a ‘negative’ topic – it’s just about protecting yourself!
Don’t hesitate to contact me or our support guys for more information!
Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371
Posted in Employees, Reporting, theft, Uncategorized Tagged with: employee, Pricing, reporting, Theft, tracking