On any given day, casinos are sometimes handling up to as much as one hundred floats for their food, beverage, and hotels. With such a large float inventory to handle on a shift-to-shift basis, casino employees often experience health and safety issues. This is due mostly to float weight and the distance they must carry them.
A large float inventory also means a high working inventory so that the necessary funds for daily transactions can be allocated to all departments. Cash management costs can run in the hundreds of thousands!
In ensuring that operations run smoothly and that all inventory is accounted for, casinos often find that issues of cash management costs lead to data management issues. Manual slips, outstanding floats, increase in floats and the signing out/returning floats are just a few of the instances that must be kept track of. Effective cash management thus saves casinos time as well as money.
Instead of wrestling with several spreadsheets, casinos have found, through research of a variety of alternatives, that there is a viable way to reconcile their floats: automation.
Cash Automation
Coin and note recyclers are machines that automate the process of dispensing and depositing cash. These electronic teller drawers are capable of circulating hundreds of floats. Automation optimizes cash flow, reducing vault holdings by a minimum of 10 percent and cutting back on armoured car fees. Since cash can be handled internally in a secure, enclosed manner, the health and safety of employees and customers is also improved.
It is a common misconception that cash automation is more expensive than the manual handling of cash by employees. This belief is understandable, as cash automation machines are high-tech and businesses like casinos that deal with large float inventories are often worried about how many machines they will need to purchase to take care of cash flow.
But the truth is actually quite the opposite. There is great variety of cash automation machines available, and labour costs are in fact reduced by automation, resulting in a higher ROI. The crucial matter of cash management costs is actually cash shrinkage.
How Do I Stop My Cash from Shrinking?
Cash at casinos isn’t literally shrinking. Shrinkage is essentially a retail term for any inventory that is lost due to ineffective cash management.
A 2014 study by the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimated that shrinkage has cost businesses at least $44 billion dollars. Of that whopping amount lost, NRF reported that internal theft was responsible for approximately 35 percent, only a few points less than shoplifting, which accounted for another 38 percent.
Remember what I said earlier about automation increasing internal security measures? With machines like coin and note recyclers handling the enclosed circulation of floats, there are less instances of tampering by employees manually handling cash. One case of internal theft cost a casino more than $25,000, with the employee involved targeting only the casino’s money.
Cash automation machines can also increase employee accountability, as their reporting system can be customized to suit a casino’s needs regarding data management (for both employee and inventory), and can offer printouts of this information for casino records. This streamlines the process of tracking all deposits, dispensations and discrepancies.
Automation=Simplification
With a high ROI, improved working conditions reducing the need for external security measures, and internal theft prevention that potentially saves casinos up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s no wonder that automation is maximizing profit. Cash automation is the wave of the future for cash management.
