Stop Employee Theft with Your POS System

How well do you know your employees? Enough to know if they were stealing out of your cash register? At least you hope so.

Employee theft is bigger than you might think. Consider these 2015 stats from Statistic Brain Research Institute.

• A typical organization loses 7% of its annual revenue to employee fraud.
• The biggest form of theft in a corporation is employee theft at 42.5%. Shoplifting comes in at 35.7%.
• 75% of employees have stolen at least once from their employer.

The encouraging news is there are some ways your point-of-sale (POS) system can help catch thieves and decrease theft. Contemplate implementing these. 

Inventory Tracking

One of the biggest areas of shrinkage in many businesses does not come from customers, but from its own employees. Accurate inventory control holds employees accountable for inventory within a store. Without accurate inventory, employees can easily walk out the back door with store inventory without any business owners and managers ever knowing that products are missing in the first place. 

Audit Log

Good POS Systems are not only capably of logging every transaction detail, but nearly every change that occurs in the system. This can allow management to know if some employees give more discounts than others, change prices, do to many voids etc. 

Employee Security Levels

Only allow staff to access what they need to do their job, and to perform only those tasks they are authorized to complete in keeping with their position. Program your POS software to control what each employee can or cannot see and do. Using log-in information like records of magnetic card swipes and fingerprint submissions, and you will be able to track employee and transactions for later review of problem areas.

Biometric Fingerprint Recognition

The use of fingerprint technology in the POS industry has become increasingly widespread, and it can be used for many things like keeping track of employee clock ins and clock outs, security clearance areas, and even shrinkage.

It makes sales associates accountable for transactions by requiring fingerprint authentication. Any action then taken by the employee is verifiable. It will not be possible to use other employee’s logins or employee cards to do transactions under someone else’s name.

Install a Security Camera System

Voiding transactions, cancelling orders, and processing the redemption of coupons that were never really offered are common ways employees steal cash from the till.

By integrating video surveillance cameras into your POS system, and setting the video surveillance system to record activity based on these and other seemingly odd occurrences, increases POS security by making it easy to identify which employees are responsible for incidents of theft. When employees are aware that they are being watched, they will be less likely to dip into the cash register.

One popular add on for a security camera system is POS data capture. Once installed anything that is rung up in the register has its corresponding receipt information displayed and recorded right over top of video from the camera that is watching the register. This will allow management to quickly audit the video transactions by type, or product sold. In this way you could quickly view all the voids, discounts, refunds etc. for problems. One example could be employee discounts. Are they really being used only for employees? With video overlay, you could view the actual discount to see if an employee was the actual customer.

In Summary 

Whether you install a security camera system, check your audit log more often, implement biometric fingerprint recognition, change security levels for employees or start tracking your inventory; you’re bound to at least lessen the temptation for employees to steal, and hopefully stop employee theft in your business all together.