Because your movie theatre relies heavily on cash payments, you are at a higher risk of cash handling problems. Opening early in the morning for matinees and closing after midnight when the last movie ends, your movie theatre entertains thousands on a daily basis—thousands of people who are paying your employees with hard currency. During these long operating hours, your employees are handling a lot of cash, which leads to a higher probability of cash handling errors being made. Here are five problems your movie theater might be having with cash handling.
1. Employee Theft
Employee theft can occur at any point in the cash cycle at your movie theatre. From the box office to the back office, if you have dishonest employees, they’ll take any opportunity to steal from you. They may fail to record transactions so they can misappropriate the cash, take money while it’s in transit, steal while counting out their floats, steal from the vault, or fake voids and discounts to get the extra cash.
To curb internal theft, you can install surveillance equipment, automate your systems so every dollar is recorded and accounted for, implement cash handling procedures for floats, end-of-day counts, and voids and discounts, and ensure that all your employees are accountable for their own cash and register.
2. Robbery
With so much hard currency coming in every day, your movie theatre is unfortunately a prime target for robbery. To protect yourself and your employees from robbery use a coin and note recycling till, deposit your cash in a locked drop safe or time-lock safe, and establish a maximum of cash that can be stored in the tills and in the safe at all times.
If your employees are depositing your cash outside the movie theatre, especially late at night, vary their travel times and schedules, implement a buddy system, and provide appropriate communications in case they need to summon help. To insure the utmost security have an armoured carrier transport your money to the bank. Robbery not only puts your cash at risk, it puts your employees at risk, so you need to protect them.
3. Counterfeit Fraud
The easiest way to protect your movie theatre from counterfeit fraud is to invest in the latest counterfeit detection technology. With counterfeit detectors at every cash register, your employees can quickly check bills for fraud and refuse any fraudulent bills before they become your problem.
4. Transaction Errors
Your employees are only human, so it’s fair to say that regardless of which precautions you take, transaction errors will inevitably occur. However, you can reduce the amount of times they occur by properly training your staff to take and give cash, automating your registers, and looking into investing in cash recyclers that do the counting and sorting for them.
5. Accounting Errors
When people count money, especially large volumes of it, they can lose count, skip numbers, or record totals incorrectly. That’s why it’s best to take the humans out of the equation and buy some coin and bill sorters and counters to do the work for you. These machines quickly and accurately count and sort your cash, so you’re left with the right total, every time.
Avoidable Problems
Employee theft, robbery, transaction errors, accounting errors, and counterfeit fraud are serious cash handling problems that you should be working on reducing at your movie theatre. The money you’re losing to these five problems is directly related to your bottom line—at the end of the day, you’re taking less of your movie theatre’s money to the bank. With proper cash handling management and solutions, like automated cash register systems, counterfeit detectors, and coin and bill sorters and counters, you can reduce your risk of avoidable cash handling problems.
