Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls
Theft is a serious problem in cigar stores. Your cigar store needs a point of sale solution that can help prevent theft, control cash and provide security for your business. Watch the video below as this video talks about how Bepoz’s Point of Sale System provides safety for your store by offering a robust POS for cigar store theft prevention, security, and cash controls solution.
Cigar Store Theft
Although shoplifting is the top property crime in the United States, sadly, shoplifting isn’t the only type of theft cigar stores regularly see. In fact, there are three major methods of theft at cigar stores. Each of these eat into your bottom line.
Three Major Methods of Theft
The three major methods of theft are:
- Cash Theft
- Overdiscounting Theft
- Inventory Theft
Cash Theft
Cash theft is just as it sounds, the theft of cash directly from the cash register. Most often this is by an employee who is hiding cash from the business. There are various ways that this can occur with any point of sale system if managers and owners are not careful, especially if they do not have feature rich point of sale systems in place.
Bepoz uses cigar store cash controls to ensure cash stays in the register where it belongs. You can use Bepoz’s Compulsory Drawer Closer that enforces the closing of the cash register between every transaction. You can also set up blind counts that continually keep track of the money in the register. There are also additional analytics to assist in identifying potential thieves.
Discount Theft
Overdiscounting Theft happens when your cashier gives bonus discounts to friends and family. They may sell items with an employee discount, apply the wrong coupons or create their own discount while scanning merchandise.
Bepoz Cigar Store Discount Controls ensure your employees don’t provide incorrect discounting. The system is configured to automatically apply the appropriate discounts when an item is scanned. If utilized, this removes the control of the employee to give discounts without approval. No additional input is required from your employees.
Inventory Theft
Inventory Theft may be what you think of as classic shoplifting. However, most inventory isn’t in the form of the five-finger discount off the shelves. Employee theft involves employees taking items from inventory and either giving them to friends or keeping those items for themselves.
The start of preventing inventory theft is a good inventory system. If you don’t know how much inventory you have, you can’t figure out how much is being stolen. If you can’t figure out how much is stolen, you don’t know how much to invest in the problem. Bepoz Cigar Store Inventory Controls keep track of all inventory, all the time.
Theft Prevention With Bepoz
Bepoz has solutions for all of these types of theft and more. Now that you know how. Bepoz Cigar Store POS can help you have a safer, more secure cigar store, give us a call. We will answer all of your questions and provide you with the information you need to start using Bepoz as your point of sale solution.
Learn More
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Is Your POS Transaction Speed Fast Enough?
Difference Between Cash Registers and POS Systems
Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:49 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Cash Theft
5:37 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Discounting Theft
7:41 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Employee Theft
Hey, this is Tim with Bepoz point of sale for tobacco stores. In this video, we’re going to talk about theft prevention for your tobacco store. Tobacco store owners are concerned about theft within their stores and it’s important to note that Bepoz has a lot of features to help you prevent that theft in your store.
There are generally three primary different ways that theft could happen in your store. You’ve got cash theft, you’ve got over-discounting, and you have inventory theft. Now there are other methods and we could talk about other different things, but we’re going to primarily focus on those three for this video.
0:49 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Cash Theft
First of all, cash theft. Now, there are some primary things that Bepoz could do to help you prevent the theft of cash, and there are lots of other options here. Now I’ve done this a long time and if we wanted to and I won’t do it because I don’t want to publicly acknowledge different ways of theft and educate thieves, but I could educate you on 10 different ways to steal from almost any point of sale system on the planet.
Let me give you an example of that. If I sell a product and I don’t ring it up through the point of sale system and I take the cash and put it in my pocket, potentially nobody will ever know that I stole cash from you. So again, the point of sale can’t necessarily stop you from every possible theft method, but I’m going to tell you how we could even catch that problem.
Let’s talk about that because that’s your worst-case scenario. There are lots of other different methods of theft, but let’s talk through that one. The first thing is that we could report potentially on your percentage of cash sales. So you sold a thousand dollars and you did four hundred dollars in cash, so you’re forty percent cash.
Now, if every day you come in unless it’s not a thousand dollars, I don’t care if it’s three hundred and you did X percent of cash sales if you’re stealing from us and we’re comparing you to other cashiers within the organization, the ones who are stealing are gonna typically have a lower percentage of cash over time. So if I look at you on a particular day, I might not be able to tell what’s happening because on any particular day, you might have, you know, lower cash or higher cash transaction value, But taken over time, most tobacco store businesses are gonna have a margin of what cash you take in, you know, let’s say somewhere between 40 and 45 percent. Every business is different, so my numbers don’t matter, but there’s some threshold in there, right?
So every employee is going to sit in that threshold of some range. What you can do is look for the employee that has the worst record and they’re the employee that you need to watch. Now that doesn’t prove anybody and there’s no court that’s going to say, hey, because they have the lowest percentage, I can now prosecute them for theft. But now I have knowledge of who I’m going to watch. Now how do I watch that employee?
Now there are other things that I could do. I could integrate with security camera systems that provide a text overlay for the transaction. So I have the video of the cashier who is performing the transaction and laid over the text over the top of that video is what they’re ringing up as they’re ringing it up on the transaction screen. So now I can look at transactions, and this is not a Bepoz feature. All we’re doing is sending the data to that security camera system. But many of those security camera systems would allow you to search for specific transaction types. This is when they did a discount. This is when they did a void. This is when they rang up some certain transaction, and they would be able to then be able to search that feed for, you know, when Johnny was working and he’s the guy I want to suspect, right, and so that could help you identify theft points because now I don’t have to search through everybody. I’m looking for their specific transactions.
Those are just a couple of examples of how Bepoz could help you do this. Now there are many, many more ways that Bepoz could do this. For instance, we can do what we call a compulsory drawer closure. That means in between transactions, the drawer has to be closed. Now without talking about how they do this, I would say that many different methods of theft will include leaving the drawers open in between transactions. So we can force that the drawer has to be closed in order to close a transaction.
Other methods might include being able to run a report at the end of their day that shows how many dollars in sales they did. So they know what should be in their drawer and they can take the balance of what should be in their drawer and stick it in their pocket. So Bepoz offers the option of being able to do a blind count. That means that cashier will have to tell the system how much money is supposed to be in the drawer before they can ever run a report that tells what is actually in the drawer, and if they’re off by more than some dollar amount threshold, you could require a manager to come in and do an override to override and allow that threshold to be off.
5:37 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Discounting Theft
So those are just a few methods. There are many, many more methods that we could help prevent cash theft. Now discounting is another method of theft. For instance and many systems offer as their only way of giving discounts within the transaction or their primary method a button on the screen that you can press and say, I want to give a discount, we have a buy one, get one half off program, and so we put a button on the system and says, you know, use this button whenever somebody comes in with buy one, get one, right, and they automatically discount. The problem with that kind of methodology is that once that cashier has a discount button they can use, they will often use those buttons to give discounts to friends, family, or other people that they just happen to like or a cute girl or they might do other nefarious methods. We won’t talk about those using discounts in order to steal from your business and they’re basically giving away the cash of your business.
Bepoz has the ability with promotions and we have a whole other video on promotions by the way, in order to automatically apply those discounts. So we take away the control for them to do discount buttons either all together or really limit what they can use it for, or we could say only a manager could use that discount button but the promotion could be, hey, buy one, get one half off and what happens is when I sell two of that product, the second product or the lower price of the two products automatically is fifty percent off. So the discount automatically applies. I could have a special this week and for this week and this week only, this product is a dollar off, and automatically for that week starting on the first of the week and ending on the last of the week, that product is a dollar off and when it comes to the end of the week, it automatically goes back to its originally scheduled price and operators don’t have to be pressing discounts in order to apply that or remember or make mistakes. I mean it could be just simple mistakes that they’re making when this happens if we think of it that way.
7:41 Cigar Store POS Theft Prevention, Security & Cash Controls: Preventing Employee Theft
Now, the final method that we’re going to talk about today is inventory. So your employees or your customers could steal inventory in your store. Now statistics are that eight-five percent of inventory theft is employee-related. That’s the statistics.
So if you’ve got inventory going out your back door or your front door, you need to know about it. So if you’re not tracking inventory, you really are going to have a very difficult time knowing if you’ve got a leak. So one of the biggest ways that you could prevent that kind of theft is by actually tracking inventory and Bepoz has a very powerful inventory tracking system. So then I know when we do inventory counts, what the discrepancy is, and what the dollar value is of what we’ve lost during whatever time period it was since I did the last inventory count, and if I’ve got that defined, I might know the value of it.
So if a security camera system costs you two thousand dollars to buy and I don’t know the prices of security camera systems, I’m sure you could buy one for less than that and more than that if you wanted to spend the money, right, let’s say with twenty thousand dollars, I don’t know, depends on the size of your store, but you have to define the problem before you define the value of that security camera system. If the security camera system costs you two thousand dollars and my leak is ten thousand dollars, then it probably is going to behoove you to get that security camera system to help you find out where your problems are.
Now, if my security camera system cost me five thousand dollars and my leak is a thousand dollars, which probably isn’t likely but possible, then you go, well, I don’t really need to buy that security camera system, but you’re better educated and know what your problem level is, right?
So you know how to invest in better protections for your business. If you understand what your inventory levels are without that, you’re really flying blind. You’ve got no dashboard to be able to figure out which problem is. So you could have a business that’s failing and not even know it because you don’t have the metrics to figure it out.
If you would like to talk to us about how we can educate you on theft prevention and give you the tools to better prevent theft within your business, we’d love to talk to you. You can call us at the number at the top of your screen or click the link below.