Cash isn’t going anywhere soon. Some countries are experimenting with cashless economies, but the fact of the matter is some customers still prefer cash.
As a business owner, you’re well aware of that fact. What might surprise you are the facts about just how much cash is costing your business. These five statistics shed light on the situation, and explain how cash recyclers can help.
Just how much is cash costing your business? It depends on which industry segment you’re in. The average across all retail businesses is nine percent.
That’s an average though, meaning the actual percentage varies among types of businesses. Bars and restaurants have the highest cost of cash, at over 15 percent. In the food and grocery industry, by contrast, the cost of cash is under five percent.
No matter what industry you’re in, you need to be sure you’re handling cash effectively.
A few factors drive the costs of cash.
The most obvious one is manual processes. More than half of retailers still count cash by hand. Manual counting is much slower than automated counting, and it has a higher margin of error. Not only do you spend more time counting the cash, you spend more time hunting down mistakes.
Manager involvement with cash handling also drives up the costs. Cash-in-transit fees and the cost of labor make up around 98 percent of cash-handling costs in retail businesses.
The solution is simple. If managers spend less time handling cash, the cost of labor falls. Automation eliminates time-consuming cash counting and corrections, which frees up manager time.
The costs of labour associated with cash aren’t entirely on your managers. About 15 percent of the time your team spends on cash management is associated with managerial tasks such as preparing and coordinating deposits or taking pickups from tills. Another three percent comes from audits and reviewing discrepancies.
The largest share of cash management time goes to till management. On average, teams spend around 16 percent of the cash management time on starting or rebuilding cash drawers. Closing the drawers takes 40 percent of their time.
More than 50 percent of the time your team spends on cash management is going to these two tasks. A coin and banknote recycler can help.
As demonstrated, the cost of cash is driven by how much time your team spends handling cash. What if you could reduce the amount of time your employees spend on preparing floats or tallying tills?
A coin and banknote recycler does just that. The recycler keeps a running tally of the cash that comes in and out of the machine, allowing your cashiers to make change from the cash they accept for transactions. At the end of the shift, the till is already counted up and ready to go.
In department stores, this can save up to 340 hours a month, while in a grocery store, the average monthly time savings can be up to 196 hours.
There are other factors involved in the cost of cash, such as CIT fees and banking costs. A coin and banknote recycler can also reduce those costs by streamlining pickups and deposits.
In doing so, your store can streamline its working capital. With a lower store float, you can free up more of your capital to keep the business running smoothly.
Not sure how much cash is costing you? A cost of cash calculator can help you see just how much you’re spending and how much you can save.