How to secure your Point of Sale: cash reports & staff control By Pieter – Project Manager

As a manager or owner you always want to know what’s going on in your business, right? Of course it is impossible to be present all the time. Probably you try to organize your business so that your staff can run it when you are not there. When you return after a period of absence, you check cash reports and maybe some camera footage to see what happened when you were not there…

In this newsletter we focus on a few elements to narrow down the flaws in your operations. Just by making it impossible for your staff to cheat, you avoid to give them the opportunity to steal.
5 tips for a better control of your business:

1. Login system for the Point of Sale The FAST Point of Sale can work with or without login. There are different methods for staff members to log in. The safest way is to issue every staff member with his own staff card. The card has to be swiped like a member card to enable the login. Another way to log in is to give your staff members a 4-digit code. Of course, this is less secure, codes can be stolen or transferred more easily than a card.

2. Refunds

Refunds are always a bit tricky. Therefore a closed operation method is more than appropriate.

• Refunds in FAST can be blocked by a secret pin code that cannot be known by the cashier. The responsible should apply the code for the cashier so that the refund is registered.
• The system asks for a comment with the refund. Force your staff to fill it out so that you know why the refund is given.
• For bigger amounts you should ask your staff members to fill out a paper form, to attach the receipts and to ask the customer to sign the form as well.

3. Checking up on karting activities

The FAST software has a whole range of (automatic) reports to check the go kart activities. These overviews will tell you who raced, who paid and more important who did not pay. Every morning the system sends an automatic e-mail which highlights all the abnormal activities on your track of the day before.
TO DO: Ask our IT department to set up your daily automatic reports by email.

4. Closing the POS

To close the POS at the end of a shift there are two possibilities. The first option: the cashier does a blind deposit and only counts the cash without knowing how much exactly should be in. The second option is the cashier prints his own cash report and counts what’s in the register.

The blind deposit means some more work afterwards by yourself or a responsible, but this way it is a lot more secure. The cashier has no idea how much should be in the register, what is sold, etc. When you choose to give the cashier the cash report, you have to recognize it is less secure! Even though some businesses choose to do it this way because it is less time consuming.

5. Extra activities (billiard, ping pong, etc)

Most businesses find it hard to control staff over rental activities like billiard, ping pong or darts where you rent out the game for a certain time. The exact rental time is hard to control and therefore it might happen some staff has a side business.

The FAST system has a way to check these kinds of rental activities. A ticket with a barcode is sold. At the specific activity location you put a computer with a barcode scanner. As soon as the ticket is scanned, the countdown starts. As a consequence, you can drop in at any moment at the activity to see how many tickets are still running. This way it is a lot harder for your staff to cheat!

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Kind regards
Benjamin