By: Tim Pincelli
A wise man once told me that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Preventing theft from people you trust is a difficult thing to consider because, idealistically, you trust in the people you trust. This same wise man also told me to trust, but always verify.
What steps do you take to prevent unwanted theft in your restaurants?
I was participating in an annual technology review with a customer that was interested in getting more from their MICROS POS system through our anytime, anywhere reports. The first meeting was with the current operations staff that was looking to have greater mobile access to reporting information. Here’s where it gets interesting. We posed the question; what reports do you look at daily to monitor unwanted theft from the employees that handle cash? The response from the General Manager (and the most common response I get) “We only hire people we can trust and we trust them all, I don’t need reports to tell me who’s stealing…I know if they are.” After some additional discussion, we were urged to continue our review of what we offer in the form of easily accessible, meaningful reports.
And there it was, a dismissing effort mounted by the long time General Manager. “Why would we want this information? That’s too much information for us to handle. We don’t have time to go through all that information!” We moved on and finished our review. Three days later, we get the call. “How quickly can you get the loss prevention reports that we discussed added to our system reporting? Following our managers meeting this morning, my General Manager (who also manages our system) in this restaurant confessed to stealing shortly after we decided to install the anywhere, anytime reports you showed us.”
We installed the following week to discover the amount was over $5,000 in just the past week.
Moral of this story…easy to understand exception threshold reporting with trends can be delivered to you on demand. These reports enable you to quickly glance at any possible offenders so that you can ask questions and prevent loss in just minutes a week. Let your MICROS sales representative tell you more about the loss prevention tools available for your restaurant.
Find out more about what MICROS can do for you! For more information contact us at info@micros.com Phone: 866.287.4736 (US and Canada)
