The use of cash for transactions is at an all-time high. Even with alternative cashless payment systems in effect in the majority of businesses, nine out of ten transactions are still paid for with hard currency. Many are worried about security risks and others simply consider using cash as more convenient.
Unfortunately, with growing cash circulation volumes, cash handling costs increase for businesses. Though handling cash doesn’t seem like it would be so expensive, the time and costs associated with cash handling activities on a daily basis can add up significantly.
If you really took the time to calculate how much you’re truly spending on handling cash, you’d probably be surprised by the numbers you come up with. To determine how much you’re paying for accepting and handling cash manually, consider how much you spend on the activities listed below.
Staff
First, let’s look at how much you’re spending just to have the right number of people handling cash. You need cashiers to take care of the customer transactions—you may have several on staff for every shift. You probably hired a manager to look over all of those transactions at the end of the day and double check that everything is correct. In addition, you probably have a cash room or vault associate at your head office who is the last person to check the cash that’s been brought in. How much are you spending per month on their pay cheques? Don’t forget to add in the cost of their benefits and other perks.
Cash Handling Activities
Cash handling isn’t just about accepting money for transactions and providing change. A lot more goes into it. So consider how much time your manager and cashiers each spend on counting and balancing the money in your vault, preparing the floats every day, handling change requests, skims, and cash pulls, reconciling the floats at the end of the nights, preparing deposits, and delivering the money to the bank. At each stage, the cash needs to be sorted and counted, double counted, recorded, and strapped or organized, all of which takes time.
Head Office Activities
Even more time will be spent on cash handling at the head office. As you know, cash audits, discrepancy investigations and shrink investigations need to be performed in a slow, meticulous, and time-consuming manner in order to ensure accuracy.
Equipment
You’ll also be spending money on monthly armoured car costs, if you use them, as well as coin wrappers, bill straps, deposit envelopes, bags and other equipment and supplies needed during the course of doing business. Add those up.
Losses
Handling cash manually comes with risks. You can be setting yourself up for some huge losses. You could be accepting fraudulent bills if you don’t have counterfeit detectors. You could be giving your employees and criminals opportunities to steal from you with lax security. And you’re at an increased risk of cash handling errors occurring during the counting, sorting, and reporting processes. All of these losses can significantly hurt your bottom line.
You Don’t Need to be Spending so Much on Cash Handling
The numbers add up, don’t they? You probably didn’t realize how much you were spending on handling cash manually. Luckily, you can reduce this expense considerably by implementing cash management solutions. When you automate the process, by investing in currency recyclers, bill and coin sorters and counters, counterfeit detectors, and other solutions, you can keep more of your hard-earned cash in your bank account. You’ll get a solid return on investment.
