Liquor Store Theft Prevention – Security & Cash Controls
Liquor store owners must consider the possibility that theft can happen at any time. It is necessary to have a process in place to prevent theft. Watch the video below as we discuss how Bepoz Point of Sales Systems can help you prevent theft at your liquor store with our effective theft prevention tactics.
Liquor Store Theft Prevention
The number of retail robberies continues to increase. Liquor stores are often the first ones hit by thieves who try to make a quick buck by robbing the till. Cash is the first method of theft at liquor stores as thieves know many customers pay with cash rather than credit cards. Bepoz uses liquor store theft prevention techniques to avoid the harm a theft can do to your bottom line.
Closing the Cash Register
Employees should close the cash register immediately after a cash transaction to ensure all money is safe and in one place. You can ensure employees are required to close cash register drawers between transactions using Bepoz’s POS system. You can then run analytics to learn how many times the register has been opened by a specific employee. Bepoz will use liquor store cash controls that show how much money is in the till compared to the amount of sales made. You will quickly know if money might have been removed from an open cash register drawer. Unfortunately, the culprit who steals from the cash register is usually not the customer but the employee.
Managing Discounts and Inventory
Theft often comes in the form of no-ring sales, which allows your employee to open the cash drawer without a purchase. Other types of theft include loss of inventory and excessive discounts. Bepoz offers liquor store discount controls that ensure discounts are only given when they are merited. Bepoz also offers liquor store inventory controls that let you track
every bottle of alcohol in your store. These security controls are necessary for a liquor store that is profitable and functions well.
Do you have questions about theft prevention for your liquor store? Do you want to know how Bepoz Point of Sale Systems for Liquor Stores works? Give us a call today!
Learn More:
POS For Liquor Store – We Have The Features You Need
Liquor Store Point of Sale (POS)
Bepoz Demonstration for Liquor Stores
Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:38 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Theft Control
1:08 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Can Integrate With Your Security
1:31 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Cash Theft Prevention Samples
2:47 Cash Control
4:21 Discounts
5:23 Automated Discounts
6:31 Inventory ControlHey, this is Tim with Bepoz’s point of sale systems for liquor stores. In this video, we’re gonna talk about theft prevention, and theft prevention in liquor stores takes on a lot of different formats and there are a lot of tools in Bepoz. We may not be able to cover all the topics here, so if you have additional questions, please give us a call. But let’s talk just a few things, and we have deep experience with theft prevention and the aspect of theft can happen within your business.
0:38 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Theft Control
So, the first method of theft that most people think of is just simply cash. I personally could tell you, and we could put it on video so that your employees could learn, ten different ways that your employees could steal from any point of sale system on the planet. There’s no point-of-sale system that could keep an employee from not ringing up a product and taking cash for it and sticking it in their pocket. If it never goes through the point of sale system, nobody will ever know it happened unless you have a security camera system.
1:08 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Bepoz Can Integrate With Your Security
So, let’s say that’s the worst-case scenario. Bepoz integrates with many popular security camera systems where you could get an overlay and see your transactions and then see the transaction on top of the video and be able to see what happened. Now that might seem a little extreme to some of you, but that is the level that it could go to.
1:31 How To Prevent Theft At Your Liquor Store: Cash Theft Prevention Samples
But there are many other options and many popular methods of employee cash theft that we could help protect. So we have things like we could force that the drawer be closed before you can do the next transaction because some of the popular ways of stealing include not closing the drawer. So as long as the drawer gets closed in between every transaction, then you would close off those.
Another option is being able to enforce blind drops. So at the end of the shift, the employee has to tell the system how much cash they have before the system will spit out a report that reports how much cash they have. And then you could enforce things like if you’re more than X number of dollars off, a manager has to approve the fact that they’re off by those dollars. But in many cases, if an employee is trying to pad the cash by getting cash for extra transactions, then you give them the report at the end of the shift by how much money is in the drawer, they take the extra money and just stick it in their pocket. Again, we won’t talk about all the different methods and educate employees, but we do want to make sure that we give you the tools to be able to find these things.
2:47 Cash Control
Now, from a cash control perspective, we also have some of the most powerful analytics anywhere in all of point of sale. And this is important to you because almost every metric of theft that you could think about really represents some kind of formula or fraction, and Bepoz has the ability to figure out and navigate your own metrics for what you consider theft in your business and design your own reports around that.
Now, first of all, we give you tons of reports that you can get right out of the bag. But if you want to come up with some kind of theft metric, and I’ll point out one that many people overlook, which is strictly percentage of cash, if you have multiple employees and you take their percentage of cash and total percentage of the sales, the more employees you have, the more glaring the problems are gonna become.
Typically, in most businesses, the percentage of cash is in some threshold range. So the more transactions you’ve done, the more that average will get closer to each other. So if one employee has a much lower percentage of cash than every other employee in the business, they’re the people you need to watch. And if you’ve got that camera system, you could use the camera to watch them and see what they might be doing in order to hide the cash, or you just need to watch them personally. But you know who it is that could be the problem because their threshold of cash or their percentage of cash sales is lower than every other person in your business.
4:21 Discounts
Now, that’s a bunch on cash. Another method for theft would be discounts. So, most point of sale systems, or many point of sale systems in my experience have buttons that you have to utilize in order to give a discount to a customer, or a customer comes in with a coupon or just a customer has some discount per some method, or you do buy one get one, or whatever the discount is, and the cashier has to press a button on the screen to give the discount.
Now, as soon as you get to button pressing for discounts, you basically given them the authority to press that button for any transaction they want. So when a friend or a family member or a customer who comes in all the time that they just happen to like or a cute girl comes in, they can give away these discounts to anybody they like.
So it’s important that Bepoz has the capacity to set up promotions and discounts in such a way that we get rid of buttons for most scenarios. Now, there’s always could be scenarios where you need a button.
5:23 Automated Discounts
But in most cases, if you’ve got a buy one get one special or a buy one get one 50% off or any of those kinds of specials or on Friday these items are on special, those could be automatically scheduled, and they will only work if you meet the qualification criteria. So on Friday, you know, these particular products are 10% off, or 5% off, or whatever the discount is, $1 off, that discount will automatically apply, no button pressing required. If it’s buy one get one 10% off or buy one get one free or whatever the special is that you have, then you have to sell two of them just like you do in the grocery store, then the discount will automatically apply. It’s important to note that taking that discount control away from your cashiers gives you better control of what things they’re discounting.
Now, on the backside in analytics again, I could tell you which of your employees are giving away the most discounts as a percentage of their transactions or discounts as a percentage of their sales and all sorts of other methods to be able to watch those employees and see who might be abusing systems if you allow them. That is option number two.
6:31 Inventory Control
Option number three for employee theft would include your inventory. So Bepoz has some of the best inventory controls anywhere. And keeping good inventory helps you know whether you have employee theft, and the statistics are eighty-five percent of inventory theft actually comes from employees, not from customers. But if you’ve got a leak and you are counting your inventory and finding out that you’re missing a lot, then you need to know is that coming from employees and cashiers.
And if you’re missing a lot, then you need to know what do you need to do, is it worth investing in that camera system or something else? Hey, if I’m losing $10,000 a year, maybe that $2,000 or $5,000 camera system becomes very worthwhile whereas if I’m losing probably not, but losing $1,000 a year, maybe I don’t want to spend $5,000 on a camera system right now.
But knowing those numbers can be very helpful in helping you make better decisions about your business. If you’re not tracking inventory, you really don’t know what you might be missing or losing in your business. So that’s a really important theft prevention technique.
So if you would like to talk to us about how we could help you with your business and help you prevent theft within your business, call us at the number at the top of your screen or click the link below.