Handling cash comes with certain risks and costs for your business. Not only do you face losses from miscalculations, misplaced cash, and human error, but every cash handling mistake also increases your labor costs. These are serious issues that can affect your bottom line.
Taking precautions to remove the risk from handling cash at your business can help you prevent unnecessary losses that can be devastating to your business.
Here are five steps you can take to reduce the risks associated with handling cash.
1. Manage Your Cash in a Timely Manner
When your establishment is busy, it’s understandable that it can be difficult to find time for cash management. However when you’re counting floats, reconciling cash drawers and depositing your cash promptly, you can significantly reduce your risks. When you wait too long to perform any of these important activities, money can get misplaced.
It might seem like a hassle to always manage your cash in a timely fashion, but it can save you considerably in the long run.
2. Make Your Employees Accountable
It may be convenient to let your cashiers share registers and let cash roll over from one shift to the other, but this blurs the lines of responsibility. When this occurs, no one is accountable for his or her own cash, and the business is the one that loses. When you have no idea who was handling cash when money went missing, you can’t identify how mistakes happened, who made them, and how to prevent them in the future.
Best practice is to make sure each employee is responsible for their own float and register and that no one else has access, so you can reduce your risk.
3. Use Counterfeit Detectors
Any business that handles cash is at risk of counterfeit. Any unsuspecting business owner can get defrauded, either by the criminals themselves or by innocent customers who have come in possession of the fraudulent banknotes. Once you take those bills, the loss is yours.
Make sure to keep yourself protected from these avoidable losses by investing in counterfeit detectors. This one small purchase can reduce your risk considerably.
4. Use Cash Counters and Sorters
Cash counters and banknote sorters take human error out of handling cash. They quickly sort mixed banknotes by denomination and count while they’re at it. They’re completely accurate and incredibly fast. Not only can you avoid wasting so much time on handling cash, but you’ll drastically reduce your risk of counting errors, miscalculations, reporting mistakes, and other types of human error that lead to losses.
5. Use a Coin and Banknote Recycler or Smart Safe
A coin and banknote recycler accepts and dispenses cash. The same money that comes in goes out for floats and transactions. Not only will this speed up the transaction process considerably, but it can also reduce many risks. First, it also acts as a vault. Second, it counts and sorts cash automatically, so you won’t lose out due to human error from handling cash manually. Lastly, it has built-in counterfeit detection capabilities. It’s like a cash counter, cash sorter, vault, and counterfeit detector, all in one.
Alternatively, consider investing in a smart safe. This cash management solution is technically advanced. Not only does it safely store your cash, but it also integrates with cash management software to help you track and manage your cash at every step. It automatically counts and sorts cash, records a history of cash movement, alerts you when cash is being moved in and out of the safe, and validates bills as well. These smart capabilities give you the ability to know exactly what’s going on with your cash, at any given time, to significantly reduce your risks.
Stay Safe
As a business owner, it’s up to you to keep your cash safe and reduce your risks from handling cash. Use these five keys to protect your cash.