How to help prevent employee theft with a POS system

Lets face it, not everyone is honest, hard-working, and loyal. We know it’s hard to think badly of the people who work for you, how could they look at you everyday? Unfortunately you need to be cautious when it comes to your bottom line. Sure most of your employees are probably wonderful people, you just can’t guarantee that all of them are. The short interview you had with them or the few hours a day that you interact with them might not be enough to give you access to their true nature.
Employee theft is the biggest threat that can happen in your company. The restaurant industry sees a total of 3 to 6 billion dollars in theft annually. A staggering 75% of restaurant employees have admitted to stealing from their employer at some point. These statistics aren’t easy to hear or believe, but it’s a hard truth you must face.  One way to control your employees is by using POS.
Before we identify how the POS will help, let’s first mention you definitely need to get rid of the cash register and invest in a POS system, as you are putting your business at high risk for theft. Staff can literally put their hands in the drawer and take out cash, or not ring something up, or record it at a different price and pocket the change. Then if you even notice something it’s hard to say who has actually taken the money because your employees can say it was someone else, or that there was a counting error.
Ok-now that we have hashed that out. There are many features of a POS that you can use to help prevent employee theft. Here are some tips for you to follow:

Security settings

A POS system allows you to give different type of access to different employees. The most common to focus on in this case would be the “VOID” button. Make sure you limit who can verify voiding to a manager. There are legitimate reasons a customer would want to void from picking the wrong item, they don’t have enough cash or ordered the wrong size. However, cashiers and waiters could also use this method to commit fraud. For example when a transaction is voided out, the purchased item is not necessarily returned . This happens because the access to cancel a purchase is not restricted.
POS software allows you to limit who is allowed to access void out sales. Thus, you can minimize the possibility of thievery.

Cash tracking

As we mentioned above cash is the easiest way for your employees to steal money from you. So without tracking who was working and what type of sales they were making you won’t be able to find the culprit.
With POS software you can easily track which employees were working how many times they “voided” a sale or hit “no sale”. Another thing to mention is that most restaurants set there POS operations to have only ONE cash drawer- so only one person is responsible for the cash going in and out of the till. Waiters will usually hold onto their cash through-out there shift. Their sales printouts will tell how much cash they owe to the restaurant. This limits the amount of hands in cash drawer and makes the waiters responsible for their own cash.

Frequent auditing

Using POS software will make it easier for you to monitor everything related to your employees activities.
You can easily monitor the below by pulling reports directly from your POS.

• Price changes
• Order voids
• Removing items from orders
• Security violation
• Time clock changes
• Cash & CC Sales
• Inventory levels

Being able to monitor these things will help you find out which of your employees has the potential to commit thievery. You also can take precautions before those misconducts happen in your company.
So if you don’t have a POS yet go and get one because thats your first step to preventing theft, and catching the thieves.
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See you next week!
Your devoted hostess,
Brittany