Building a succesful business in these times is hard. Retailers can defintely not afford to make their work harder by not having the necessary tools and processes to prevent cashier theft.
At Loystar, we’ve heard reports of cashiers running businesses down by stealing from the cash register or manipulating transactions. This issue can impact the bottom line and lead to a loss of customer trust and eventual shutdown of a business. However, there are ways to reduce or completely prevent these types of malicious and harmful activities in your retail business.
Besides recuriting honest people, you want to make sure your point of sale processes and systems are designed to prevent theft, because we know, having decent people it not enough.
Here are seven things you can do to safeguard your business from this problem of cashier theft:
- Train Your Employees on Ethics and Integrity: Education is an essential tool to prevent cashier theft. Provide training sessions for your employees on ethics and integrity, and make sure they understand the consequences of their actions. Explain that stealing from the cash register is illegal and will result in termination and legal action. Encourage them to report any suspicious activities by their colleagues. if there are cases of theft, your management team or the owners should not tolerate such at all.
- Implement a POS System with Provision for Cashier User Access and Security Features: Investing in a point-of-sale (POS) system with security features is an excellent way to prevent cashier theft. First, you need to ensure you can identify who made a sale, especially if you have more than one cashier selling to customers. Each cashier should have thier own login details. Their are several advanages of doing this e.g understanding which cashier point of sale attends to customer most.
You should also pay attention to ensuring your POS system has a facility that makes it possible for a higher authority like a manager or the business owners to authorize changes in a bill or invoice. This would checkmate a common practice of theft where bad cashiers may reduce items on a bill, but charge the customer a full amount and pocket the difference. A system like Loystar POS that ensures a manager or admin is informed by the cashier before a bill change, in addition to limiting the access of the cashier to the system and ensure that only authorized employees have access to sensitive information would be appropiate in this regard. - Conduct Regular audits of your Sales Records: These audits should include cash counts, reviewing transaction logs, and comparing sales data to cash receipts. By conducting audits, you can detect any suspicious activities early and take corrective actions.
- Use Video surveillance or other means: It is not un-common to find CCtv camera install in retail shops. This is definitely useful for monitoring your staff as well as customers. However, we have seen business owners try to hide the cameras or make them less obvious. We suggest not to do this. What is more effective is clearly notifying your staff as well as customers that there is video surveillance in progress. This can be communicated in a friendly to make it comfortable, while also discouraging the staff or customers from engaging in any fraudulent activities or theft because they know they are being watch. Also, perform random inspectiona of the video to check the cashier are following your transaction process as specified.
- Implement a Loyalty Program: You may wonder how implementing a loyalty program can help prevent cashier theft, but if definitely helps. By offering loyalty points or rewards for each transaction, and making it clear and transaparent what customers stand to gain, customers will demand that the cashier logs every transaction. The outcome of this process would encourage your customers to be almost become a “Police” for your tranctions because they also have an interest. They would ensures that every transaction is recorded accurately, because every amount spent counts for value. If you take the time to very well design your loyalty program, such that every amount spent rewaards the customer with points that count towards reward in the form of a giftcard or actual cash, you can be sure of having complete and accurate visibility into your daily transactions. There are a number of things to put in place for this strategy to work e.g Display signs to remind customers to demand their loyalty points, ensuring customers collect their receipts everytime. e.t.c Need Help with getting this done, you can book a session with us.
- Set a Positive Work Environment: Create a positive work environment that encourages honesty, transparency, and mutual respect. This can be achieved by providing employee benefits, recognizing good work, and fostering an open-door policy. Employees who are happy and motivated are less likely to engage in fraudulent activities.
In conclusion, preventing cashier theft is crucial for the success of your retail business. By implementing a combination of the above strategies, you can minimize the risk of cashier theft and protect your business from financial loss. As the common saying goes, prevention is always better than cure, and it’s essential to act promptly if you detect any suspicious activities.
