In the hustle and bustle of a quick service restaurant, cash management may be a low priority. Customers are expecting to receive their order quickly and without any hassle. The fast-paced environment can be a lot of work for staff to keep up with. This can often lead to poor cash management procedures which end up putting a dent in the profitability of your business.
Here are seven cash management tips that all quick sere restaurants should put into practice:
1. Train Staff Properly
Quick service restaurants often have high levels of employee turnover, and incoming staff are needed to start working right away without receiving much training. Taking the time to properly train employees is extremely important to maintain high levels of customer service and to keep your business running securely.
2. Prioritize Accuracy
It’s easy for proper procedures to fall through the cracks, particularly during busy periods throughout the day. When your staff are dealing with long lines of hungry customers, cash management best practices might can be difficult to keep up with. Making sure that your staff are ensuring that each cash transaction is processed correctly with the correct amounts being accepted and dispensed will keep your business on track and save you time and money.
3. Increase Accountability
Another pitfall of high rates of employee turnover is that many staff do not feel a sense of loyalty to their workplace or employer. Creating safeguards that promote employee accountability can make the difference between staff who don’t care and staff who take pride in their work. Making use of cash management technology that uses personal identification numbers is a simple way to keep track of which employees have made any given transactions.
4. Reduce Risk of Theft
Quick service restaurants receive a lot of cash transactions as they deal with lower purchase totals. That means that they often have a lot of cash in store, which can leave them vulnerable to theft, both internal and external. Taking precautions to ensure that your business is protected from theft is a sound investment. When you invest in cash automation solutions, your employees and customers will have less access to your cash, creating a safer and more secure work environment.
5. Don’t Waste Time
Time is at a premium in a quick service restaurant. To keep up with the demands of managing large volumes of cash, investing in cash automation such as coin and currency sorters can drastically reduce the time it takes to process cash. Manual cash processing to balance tills full of small bills can easily eat up a lot of time, especially when errors have been made. When you increase the efficiency of your cash management process, your staff can focus on serving customers.
6. Establish Policies and Procedures
If your restaurant does not have proper policies and procedures in place, there is very little point to introducing cash automation. Your staff must be aware of best practices when it comes to cash handling such as making sure orders are accurate, accepting payment before giving customers their order, and discouraging employees from sharing cash registers. Keeping your policies and procedures up-to-date and your staff well-informed ensures the success of your cash processing.
7. Secure your Cash
With the large volumes of cash that many quick service restaurants handle each day, it is important to make sure that you are storing that cash in a secure way. Investing in a smart safe can be a game changer for your restaurant, as it stores, sorts, authenticates, and records each cash transaction. Smart safes protect against currency fraud and help to increase the accountability of your staff by tracking each cash transaction.
