When you are wondering if you have an internal theft situation, you can turn to exception based reporting to help guide you.
The exception based reporting is just that- exceptions to typical conduct, generally found on the POS system.
For example, if a cashier conducts a “NO Sale” They are generally opening the cash register drawer without conducting a sale. A legitimate reason for doing this would be because they incorrectly gave back a customer change, and need to fix it.
In exception based reporting, a second criteria is added- no sale following a voided transaction. That could mean that the employee rang up a customer who was going to pay in cash. Instead of hitting total at the end of the transaction, they voided the transaction out completely.
To make sure the customer still thinks they are buying your product, the cashier hits NO SALE and takes the customer’s money and gives them back their proper change.
Since the transaction was never completely processed, there is now additional cash in the drawer. At some point, the cashier will take this extra cash and pocket it, creating an employee theft situation. You would not see a cash shortage, but an inventory shortage.
In order to investigate this employee theft situation, you would either need to take a physical inventory of every single item in your store on a daily basis (not very realistic) or you could implement exception based reporting.
For more information on employee theft, employee theft investigation or internal theft contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia
