Help to avoid theft in your restaurant

Theft is not a word you want in the vocabulary at your restaurant.   However, it is the unfortunate truth for most restaurant owners that they will have to deal with at one time or another. Some of the most common issues of restaurant theft come straight from your employees.
What you need to remember is that opportunities for theft will depend on the operations and setup of your restaurant. You need step back and think like a thief to recognize to prevent it from happening.
It’s hard to think that people that you hired and gave an opportunity to would be stealing from you. As ridiculous as it sounds, 75% of employees have admitted to stealing from their employees at least once.
Employee theft in restaurants takes many forms, including giving away free food and drinks to customers without authorization, and stealing food or alcohol for themselves. Most employees only steal because they know they can and their chances of getting caught are slim.
We want to show you how you can use your POS to help prevent your staff from stealing from you.
WHAT YOUR POS CAN DO TO HELP WITH THEFT
Inventory management: Making sure you pay close attention to exact inventory management is a good point to start for preventing employee theft. Your POS is a tool created to help streamline your business, utilize it and make sure it’s working for you. Don’t ever estimate when counting your inventory. Besides recording your inventory accurately you can also place pour control caps on your liquor, install weighted bar rails, and manual itemized bi-weekly fridge counts to keep a closer eye on your supply. If your staff can see that you know what you have at all times they will keep there hands off!
Comping policy: Showing gratitude to your loyal customers by complimentary items is part of the restaurant business. Set up individual comp budgets you’re your employees with your POS. It can be a daily or weekly budget you decide, but make sure you allocate for all the complimentary items. If you can manage this, then you can keep you on track with your sales goals.
Security settings and controls: The most important way your business can defend itself from theft is through a POS system. A POS helps you run and operate your business more efficiently by tracking inventory, cash flow, sales and tips. The POS tracks all transactions and you can set security preferences that requires the server to get permission from a manager before changing anything on a bill. You can give your most trusted managers permission to comp and alter checks. This setting will help to eliminate the access to voiding and deleting items.
Cash Tracking: The easiest way your staff can steal from you that is the most difficult to track is through cash transactions. You can set your POS system to always require a button and dollar amount for every time the cash drawer opens. Then if someone enters a ‘void, ‘no sale’ or ‘cash paid out’ it’s documented and you can directly find out why those buttons were pressed.
Things fall through the cracks, were all human but do what you can to keep your business safe against theft. You yourself can also play a role in what drives them to steal. Make sure you create a work environment that is friendly, open and fulfilling. No one wants to steal from the nice guy.
Like our stories or want to hear more? Drop us a line @ Blogpointos@gmail.com.
See you next week!
Your devoted hostess,
Brittany
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