The grocery store sector is highly competitive with razor-thin profits. With little extra capital to spend on enhancing operations, it may be difficult to justify an investment in upgraded cash management technology. However, technology is growing quickly, and an investment in next-generation tech may be the right path forward to ensuring you maintain a competitive edge.
Upgraded cash management hardware and software offers many advantages. If any of the signs below resonate with you, it may be time to upgrade for the good of your grocery store.
1. You’re Wasting Too Much Time Handling Cash
Did you know that the average cost of cash handling in food and grocery is 4.7%? A key issue is that the most expensive and trusted store employees — the managers — are heavily involved in handling cash by hand, which increases the cost of cash processing. Just think about how many hours every day your employees are spending on starting and rebuilding cash drawers, closing drawers and preparing deposits?
If you’re spending too much time handling cash manually at your grocery store, it’s a telltale sign that you may benefit from upgrading your cash management technology. The right cash automation technology will help reduce manual processes to reduce high labor costs and ultimately reduce the cost of cash. By controlling the cost of cash handling, your store may save upwards of 200-500 labor hours a month.
2. Theft Is on the Rise
Cash shrinkage makes up approximately 6.6% of the total cost of cash, and unfortunately, your trusted employees may be the cause. When you have slim profit margins, you simply cannot afford such a high shrinkage rate.
Your current technology may not be doing enough to enhance employee accountability. It could be a good idea to invest in the latest cash management devices, such as smart safes and coin and banknote recyclers, which will create an audit trail and help you keep tabs on all your cash movements at all times with individual employee PINs.
3. Your Customer Experience Isn’t What It Could Be
In the grocery sector, the customer experience is often critical to success. It’s important to ensure your customers have a convenient and pleasant shopping experience, which extends to your checkout lanes. Long wait times and impatient customers could signal that you need a tech upgrade.
Cash management devices at the checkout may reduce manual cash handling and speed up transaction processing.
Because the devices do the counting and sorting for your employees automatically, it also eliminates the risk of human error while processing transactions.
4. You’re Experiencing a Lot of Downtime
Every technological device has a natural product life cycle and lifespan. Over time, your devices may not work as well as they once did, especially if they weren’t properly maintained on an ongoing, regular basis. If your current tech always seems to be down, it could be a big sign that it’s time to upgrade.
5. You Don’t Have Insights into Your Cash
Your current cash management technology may be able to reduce some of your manual cash handling and enhance security, but new software is now available to help you get even more out of your hardware. Integrate Cash management software into your current smart safes and coin and banknote recyclers to give you greater insight into your cash position, analytics, forecasts and more.
The importance of cash insights cannot be understated. After all, understanding a company's cash position is key to the success of a business and concerns relating to it are so prevalent that 70% of business leaders know their exact cash balance. Shouldn’t you be one of them?
