Cash handling mistakes can result in a large percentage of your shrink rate. The more mistakes that are made, the bigger your losses. And these losses can affect your bottom line.
But internal theft, robbery, vendor fraud, and other causes of shrink are avoidable if you’re proactive about eliminating them from your business. So are cash handling mistakes. You do not need to simply accept them as an inevitable part of doing business. You can nip them in the bud, reduce your losses, and increase your profitability.
The cash handling mistakes detailed below are totally avoidable.
1. Transactional Errors
Counting and sorting errors are often made at the register. When cashiers are busy and are facing long lines of impatient customers, they might not put as much time and effort into their transaction processing as they should.
As a result, they could end up short changing customers, which would hurt your customer service. Or they could end up giving too much change back, resulting in losses for your business. Either way, transactional errors are avoidable in a few ways.
For one, these errors can be significantly reduced through cashier training. By implementing cash handling policies and procedures and providing proper cashier training, you can help ensure that cashiers are accurate in their cash handling at the register. Secondly, you could also use a cash recycler at the register instead of relying on your employees to count and sort your cash. The cash recycler will accept, count, sort, and dispense cash for transactions automatically.
2. Double Counting
Double counting may seem like a solution to human error but it’s actually a cash handling mistake on its own. The more often cash needs to be handled and counted, the higher your labour costs will increase. And this increase could be worse than the losses you’d accept due to the errors in the first place. It’s not an effective solution. Instead, you could use cash counters and sorters to increase the speed and accuracy of your cash counting, without needing to increase your labour costs.
3. Too Much Cash on Hand
Many businesses end up with ultra-full registers because employees are too busy to perform cash drops at the vault. They also end up with full safes because they’re too busy to deposit the profits at the bank or you are simply holding too much cash ‘just in case.’ But having too much cash on hand is risky for internal theft, lost cash, and robbery, and it’s totally avoidable.
You can invest in a currency recycler, which recycles cash from one transaction to another to ensure that you always have the exact amount of cash on hand, without worrying about vault transactions. When connected with your POS system, a smart safe, too, can be programmed to remind employees to perform vault drops when till maximums are met. Both of these solutions will reduce your risks.
4. Verifying Bills for Counterfeit by Sight and Touch Alone
You may have trained your workers to detect counterfeit bank notes by sight and touch. And they might truly have great counterfeit detection skills. But counterfeits are becoming more sophisticated and the act of counterfeiting itself is becoming more prevalent. That means your cashiers will be facing an increasing number of counterfeit bank notes, and these frauds will look nearly identical to authentic bills, making it easier for them to slip by.
Though this is one of the most common cash handling mistakes, it’s easily rectifiable by implementing counterfeit detectors at your points of sale. Let counterfeit detection technology do the verifying, and you’ll guarantee that no fraudulent bills become your losses.
These four cash handling mistakes are totally avoidable when you automate your cash management process.
