Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls

Do you want to learn more about tobacco store threat prevention, security, and cash controls? If so, you’re in the right place! Theft is a major problem in tobacco stores. With the need for security growing stronger each day, you need a point-of-sale system you can count on. Watch the video below on how Bepoz will help your tobacco store overcome this threat to your profits.

Three Major Tobacco Store Threats

Retail theft is a serious concern that only continues to grow. Sadly, theft doesn’t just happen from the customer’s end. In fact, what can be argued to be the largest area of concern for tobacco stores is the employees rather than the would-be customers.

There are three major tobacco store threats when it comes to employee theft. The first, and most obvious, is cash theft. An employee may take cash from the drawer while it is open or they might overcharge a customer while keeping the extra cash themselves. It should be noted that cash theft is also possible from the customer’s end. If the cash drawer is left open or is easily opened, a thief can take whatever cash they desire and leave the premises before they are even noticed.

The second is over discounting theft. A cashier may offer additional discounts to friends or to themselves when making purchases. This lowers the price of the product significantly, which obliterates your profit margin. Sometimes the discounting is so egregious that your employee is giving away products for free.

The last is inventory theft. Sometimes called inventory shrinkage, inventory theft occurs when employees remove items from storage for their own use or to resell.

How to Prevent Theft and Improve Your Tobacco Store Security

Bepoz point of sale systems offers theft prevention tools to lower your risks of loss due to theft. The system offers cash controls, discount controls, and inventory controls. The system can give exact amounts and only offers the discounts that are permitted based on the product sold, date, time of day, offers, promotions, store locations, and more. Bepoz also provides automatic inventory accounting. With each transaction, Bepoz tracks all inventory on the shelves and in stock. The tobacco store analytics offered through Bepoz lets you see who was at the cash register with every transaction made. You can even track each and every button press if needed.

Another theft prevention technique offered by Bepoz is compulsory drawer closing. This program enforces a closed cash register between each transaction. The system can also run a blind count on dollars in the cash register any time you wish. There are so many ways to control theft, there are too many to list.

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Video Transcript

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:14 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Theft Prevention Features
0:25 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Methods Of Theft
0:47 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Cash Theft
1:53 Cash Sale Percentage Reports
2:22 Theft: Lower Cash Percentages
5:17 Blind Count Cash Drawer Option
5:51 Over Discounting
6:47 Automatically Discount Items
7:54 Inventory Theft
8:05 Percentage Of Employee Theft
8:30 Track Your Inventory
9:51 Invest To Protect Your Business

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. 

0:14 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Theft Prevention Features

Many 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.

0:25 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Methods Of Theft

Now, 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.

0:47 Tobacco Store Theft Prevention, Security, And Cash Controls: Cash Theft

So, first of all, cash theft. Now there are some primary things that Bepoz could do to help you prevent 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.

1:53 Cash Sale Percentage Reports

The first thing is that we could report potentially on your percentage of cash sales. So you sold a thousand dollars and you did 400 in cash to your 40 cash. Now if every day you come in and let’s say it’s not a thousand dollars, I don’t care if it’s 300 and you did x percent of cash sales. 

2:22 Theft: Lower Cash Percentages

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 at 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 values. But taken over time, most tobacco store businesses are going to have a margin of what cash you take in, you know, let’s say somewhere between 40 and 45. 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 nothing 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? 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 could 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 examples of how Bepoz could help you do this. 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. 

5:17 Blind Count Cash Drawer Option

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. So those are just a few methods. There are many many more methods that we could help prevent cash theft. 

5:51 Over Discounting

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, something 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.

6:47 Automatically Discount Items

So 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 altogether 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 products, the second product or the lower price of the two products automatically is 50 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 price 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, okay?

7:54 Inventory 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

8:04 Percentage Of Employee Theft

Now, statistics are that 85 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

8:30 Track Your Inventory

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 for instance, let’s say 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 twenty thousand dollars, I don’t know, it 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?

9:51 Invest To Protect Your Business

So you know how to invest into 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 what your problem is. So you could have a business that’s failing and not even know it because you don’t have the metric 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.