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Think You’re Wasting Time With Cash Register Counts?

One of our users recently wrote us with this story about how doing regular opening and closing till counts helped them catch an employee thief. There are many reasons why you should count your till before opening and after closing. I think you’ll find this one very compelling:

“Well, as much as we complain about having to count the drawer at open as well as close, the logic of doing so became unavoidably blatant this past week (not that I ever doubted the logic of it, mind you!). I don’t want to think of my employees as thieves! Well, my idealistic fantasy was demolished when the opening count came up way short last Monday and all the scrutiny we gave the situation made it abundantly clear that the money had been stolen. I have subsequently learned that opening shortages have happened before. And a few expensive parts have disappeared, parts only accessible to employees. No one mentioned the shortages, because they assumed that whoever closed took the wrong amount of $ out of the drawer for the deposit. Just human error, not a theft.

When I closed last Sunday, I had to rush out for a movie date, leaving one drawer short .64 cents. When my co-workers opened, *both* drawers were short, and not by a mere .64 cents either.

I was flabbergasted and my immediate response was not to cry “Thief” but to assume somehow *I* had totally screwed up the count or the deposit. (Can you say Queen of Denial?)

Upon multiple drawer re-counts, a thorough going over of our manual drawer count notes from Sunday’s close, review of our actual deposit vs MerchantOS payments reports, conversations with the few employees who actually had access to the drawers, it was obvious that in addition to the .64 cents, $45 was missing.

So, I called the alarm company. Records showed that after I activated the system Sunday night, someone else deactivated and reactivated the alarm, staying a mere 5 minutes, well before we officially opened on Monday morning.

Thanks for designing a system with reality in mind. None of us wish to think of our cohorts as dishonest. And many of us willfully ignore blatant signs of dishonesty because it is so far from our own personal ethics. Without an actual eyewitness of a thief with their hand in the till, making an accusation can be difficult.

Our remaining staff now knows that theft can be discovered, and will not be tolerated. And since Monday, several employees have come to me and let me know of suspicious activity on the part of the employee we have now fired. We all feel stupid for not putting it together sooner, but we are also more willing to admit to the existence of thievery, even in our best buds, which will hopefully protect us from denial in the future. and every morning, when we count the drawer, we have a reminder that although it is hard to think ill of others, we must face the fact that people do stupid things, no matter how much we may like them.”

Best regards,
Deborah
MerchantOS Customer