POS Security – Audit Your Employees & Transactions with Enterprise POS Security

No one wants to believe that they have to worry about internal theft. Unfortunately, employee theft is a problem that affects every industry. Any company’s profits, regardless of the number of employees they have or the type of business they conduct, can be greatly impacted by employees who skim money or products.

Employee Theft by the Numbers

The latest data shows that businesses in the United States lose about $50 billion per year from employee theft. No industry is immune from this sad fact. In fact, retail and restaurant owners may be the most likely to find their profits suffering.

Other facts about employee theft:

Tracking Inventory Data

The most important fact is that it is very likely you have employees who are stealing from you. Fortunately, Bepoz has an easy solution that lets you track all employees and products.

Non-cash employee theft is managed with an inventory solution. Your products have UPC codes or other tracking numbers that are scanned or keyed in at the point of sale. Automatic inventory reductions take place, which allows you to compare what products you have in stock with the accurate number of product sales. Thanks to real-time updates, you can keep a close watch on the employee shifts in which products have disappeared.

Audit Trails on Product Sales

One of the most common types of employee theft is product discounts and markdown. Employees may offer special, unapproved discounts on merchandise that is purchased by themselves or by friends.

Our point-of-sale software solutions are not simply register and inventory tools. Our product offers scheduled promotions, promotions that are tied to customer accounts and smart coupons that can remove or reduce options for employees to give discounts to customers. Also, if a discount button is required, every discount button has a permission level so that you can decide which employees have permission to give that discount. 

In addition to all protections listed above, Bepoz has data tracking system that logs every keystroke an employee enters. You can see exactly which discounts employees have given and when items were marked down.

Alerting You to Fraud

Bepoz can alert you to fraud through text messages, emails or in-program alerts when certain actions occur at the point of sale. You can be notified any time a product discount is given or a refund over a certain amount takes place. If you suspect a specific employee of committing theft, you can set alerts to actions specific to that employee.

Contact Bepoz today to learn what we can do to help you curb employee theft. We are waiting to hear from you!

 

Video Transcript:

Hey, this is Tim with Bepoz Enterprise – Point-of-Sale Systems, and today I’m going to talk to you about managing and being able to audit your system on an enterprise basis. It’s very important that you be able to audit your transactions and your managers, and make sure that both from an accountability standpoint, the people who are doing certain actions are known, that they know that there’s a fingerprint trail of everything that happens. And it’s also important that you’re able to catch theft, and those kinds of things, from a head office and management perspective, and look back and track what’s happening. We’ll talk about both of those.

So first of all, in the back-office portal, where you’re managing all the products, and the prices, and running reports and all of those kinds of things, Bepoz has an audit trail that trails all the things that you do in there. So you’ve probably had this example, we’ve seen it many different times with our clients, where all of a sudden some price gets changed on some product, and it’s now being sold at below margin – you’re losing money on the product – and everybody in the organization wants to know. They all start finger-pointing, “Jim did it. Susie did it. Joe did it.” And nobody knows who’s the one who actually did it. But because we actually audit all these pieces, we could actually look back at the history of that specific product and say, “Here’s the price change. Here’s who made it, here’s when they made it, here’s where they made it.” Those kinds of things.

So many different things could be audited like this, and audits could actually be turned into alerts. So when certain actions happen, we could actually set up either email messages, text messages; or we could set up internal alerts within the back office application, that pop up on the screen that say, “This event happened,” and then you can run the reports, see what happened, and filter out certain types of events. And events also can have a priority, so you can have different levels of events that are happening within the audit. And so you could basically filter out and, “I want to see all their critical events,” or, “I want to see the warning events,” or, “I want to see just the informational events.” Oftentimes people are really wanting to look at the ones that they deem to be critical, and they want to know when those happen. So somebody does a discount and it’s more than $50, you get a text message, we could go in and see all the events about that; what transaction had happened, where it happened, who did it, what items were on the transaction when they did it. And then I could go drill into the detail and see every single key-button press that had happened.

So in Bepoz, we log every transaction that happens at the register, and then we also log on top of this – this is optional, but we also log on top of that every single key-button press it took to do that transaction. So you can log down to the button press. So if you have a suspicion that some particular employee may be stealing, I could actually go down and look at their discounts, and then see each of their discount transactions, and see how they did those discounts.

It is important to note, that there are metrics that you can use from a reporting standpoint to find out how an employee could be stealing from you. So we could say for instance, “Who has the most discounts as a percentage of their total sales?” That could be quantity of discounts, or that could be dollars of discounts. “Who has done a no-sale on the drawer?” – If you allow no-sales – “Who’s done the most no-sales? Who has done the most [of many different things]? Who is giving away the most discounts? Who’s giving away the most of some specific discount or discounts as a total, as a percentage of their sales?” Because some employees might’ve sold $50,000, and some might’ve sold $2,000. You don’t want to say that the person who has a thousand dollars’ worth of discounts, and the other person has a hundred dollars’ worth of discounts. If you measure it as a percentage of their total sales, you now know that the person who did $2,000 worth of sales, might have actually done more discounts, because I measured as a percentage rather than looking at the gross. The person who actually did $1000 worth of discounts, might actually have less as a percentage.

So those kinds of metrics could be easily built with our customized reporting. You can build in your own formulas; many of our managers don’t even use Excel anymore, because they can customize their own formulas into our reports and figure out things like this. These are hugely beneficial to audit teams that are using our system. If you’d like to find out how we can help you secure your systems, and help you audit and manage your systems, we’d love to talk to you. You can either call the number that’s at the top of the screen or click the link below.