A movie theatre is a place where hundreds, if not thousands, of people enter every day to be entertained and to spend money. When people go to a movie theatre, they spend money on tickets, concessions, and on the video arcade that many movie theatres have. Some people will pay for all of this with debit or credit, but many people will pay in cash.
At any given time, there’s a large amount of cash moving through your business, and there are multiple ways you’re routinely losing it.
1. Employee Theft
For any business that sees a large amount of cash on a daily basis, there’s an increased risk of employee theft. Part of the reason employees end up taking money is because they have the opportunity to do so. If your business has poor cash management systems and practices in place, it can be easy for an employee to take money without you realizing it.
Employee theft is a problem many businesses face. According to the Retail Council of Canada, an employee usually ends up stealing $2,500 worth of cash or goods before they’re caught. That’s a lot of money that you can’t afford to lose.
The best chance you have of cutting down on employee theft is to automate your cash management practices as much as possible. When there are fewer manual cash management tasks, there are fewer opportunities for employees to steal.
One way you can automate your processes is to invest in a smart safe. The smart safe requires everyone who has access to it to have their own individual logins. This ensures you know who’s opened the safe and taken money out of it, making employee theft in the back room almost non-existent.
2. Counterfeit Currency
Another way your movie theatre is losing money is through counterfeit currency. People are more likely to pass off counterfeit bills in businesses that handle a lot of cash, such as movie theatres. These people are counting on the fact that your employees are busy and don’t have the time to manually check each bill.
In order to cut down on the amount of counterfeit money your business receives, you should invest in a counterfeit detector. A counterfeit detector scans any bill you put through it and informs your employees if the bill is a fake. This stops your employees from accepting fake currency and ensures the money going into your safe is all legitimate.
3. Poor Cash Handling Skills
Human error is responsible for many things in this world, including why money goes missing. Sometimes, when money goes missing, it isn’t because of employee theft but because employees counted money incorrectly or gave back the incorrect amount of change to a customer. Employees are human and they’re going to make mistakes, but you can mitigate those risks by teaching your employees proper cash handling skills.
Your employees should know how to count back change correctly, and they should be well-practiced in different kind of situations that arise when accepting money from a customer. For example, when employees are handed money, they should leave the customer’s money on the top of the till and count back change. Should the customer ever say they gave your employee a $20 bill when they in fact gave them a $10, your employee will be saved the argument by pointing to the $10 bill on the top of the till.
There are multiple ways your movie theatre is losing money on a daily basis, but it doesn’t have to continue. Talk to a cash management expert about your business, and learn about the different tools that are at your disposal to help your business improve its cash management.
