Do Voids Make Your Register Short

Prevent Employee Fraud: Voids & Comps

Employees Learn Quick

Voids, Comps, and other ways to adapt orders in process, just placed or delivered are a necessity if y'all operate a eatery. Let's face information technology, employees can make mistakes while entering orders just every bit customers can alter their minds and now want a different item or realize they don't have enough cash and now demand to pay with a credit card. On the other hand, if y'all just tendered a client's social club to cash, you lot'll need to void the order and re-enter using the new tender type.

Of course, these are just ii of many examples where voids are a requirement. Comps on the other paw are used in the eatery business when the incorrect item was delivered or the client was unhappy with their experience. While these tools are available to make corrections and adjustments as needed – your employees learn quickly that they can just every bit easily exist manipulated to their fiscal advantage.

While theft is an area many restaurateurs prefer non to discuss, it doesn't mean it's not happening in their restaurants. In fact, the NRA did a report and concluded that restaurant loss due to fraud runs on boilerplate around 4% of sales. Couple this with the incredibly narrow margins restaurants operate on and ane tin can meet why information technology's important to accept this seriously and implement the controls needed to minimize your losses.

Eatery Employee Theft Types

As you might suspect, at that place's no lack of creativity when information technology comes to theft, which simply means there's more ways it can occur in your restaurant than you might imagine.

Hither's a few examples:

Employee not ringing upwardly a sale and keeps cash
Adding unearned tips to checks
Applying coupons to cash checks
Clocking in early or clocking out tardily
Selling your own inventory of items
Reusing the aforementioned cheque
Stealing silverware and glassware
Managers floating greenbacks from deposits
Stealing gift certificates or gift cards
Managers calculation discounts to checks at shut
Walking out with nutrient or liquor
Under portioning and keeping the extra sale

It's non my intent to try and cover each style a eating place tin exist losing money, rather, I'll focus on the king of eatery losses - cash theft. Here again, there are a number of ways greenbacks theft tin occur, but the focus of this commodity is on two of the more pop methods – voids and comps. And so, before we talk well-nigh the fraud potential of each, let's have a quick await at what constitutes a void VS. a comp and how each can be used to steal from your restaurant.

Void

In the context of point-of-sale and accounting systems, the term void is a transaction which cancels, or deletes entirely, a previously completed transaction. The distinction is that the transaction being voided is 1 that was already completed, versus one that is still in the process of existence fabricated.

Notation: Depending on your POS system Void may actually be called; Cancel, Over-ring, Delete, Clear, etc. Voids are a necessity. For example, an employee takes an gild and the client changes their mind and if servers are voiding items that are delivered to the customer instead of recording them every bit a comp, yous volition reduce your gross food sales which makes it appear that the sale never happened, and this makes it platonic for theft to occur - allow's take a closer await at how that might happen.

In many restaurants the server has the authority to remove/void an detail from a check. In these situations, it's possible for a server to charge a customer the full corporeality for their guild, but after void items from the ticket and pocket the cash. For example, a customer orders three items for a final bill of $25. The client so leaves behind $xxx cash on the tabular array for the bill and tip.

The employee then voids out 1 of the items, bringing the total down to $18. Thus, the server pockets the extra $7 plus the original $5 tip, and the annals however reflects the correct amount of cash-based sales.

Comp

Comps are items taken off the pecker on products that have been delivered. For example, the wrong drinkable was made and delivered to the guest. Or, yous gave away a drink to a guest for any number of reasons such as they're a regular in your eatery or you're making up for a problem that occurred.

Notation: Comps may also be called Discounts and depending on how comps are accounted for or not in your bookkeeping system, they tin have an impact on your income statement.

Regardless of what your Voids are actually called or how your Comps are handled after the fact, if they're beingness manipulated past your servers or managers to their financial proceeds, they'll each have a direct impact on your bottom line. This makes it of import to have a program of activeness and a means to easily and more quickly place those employees that may be stealing – after all, every bit Ben Franklin said; "Time is coin."

Preventing Restaurant Theft

At present that we've identified two of the ways theft tin occur the question is what practice you do to get ahead of it before it really impacts your bottom line. Well, as we mentioned before, i indicator volition exist an unexplained increase in your food costs. While this early notification is swell, I liken it to being more like smoke on the horizon – you know there'due south a burn down just you lot don't know its origin or how big it might be or what you lot need to exercise to put it out. And then, you demand more insight before you tin can successfully put it out. To do that yous need cheque level detail – that's every line item, on every cheque from every location every day and as y'all likely know that'due south a lot of information. Of grade, there are any number of tools that tin aid narrow this downwardly but in the terminate it's still going to have resources and time to sort through and come up to whatsoever conclusions and in today's tight labor pool how many companies accept actress resources they tin dedicate to this effort.

Solution - Exception-Based Reporting

Then, the best way to minimize the fourth dimension needed to detect fraud while maximizing your ability to gainsay information technology is by using the data your point-of-sale arrangement makes bachelor (check level detail) and then combine information technology with an exception-based reporting technique to narrow the listing downwards to but those who, among your staff (cashiers, servers, managers) are nigh likely stealing.

Exception-Based Reporting is done past establishing a set of filters (what'southward acceptable/unacceptable to your company) that are and so applied to the check level particular to produce exceptions. For example, a company may determine that it'due south unacceptable to take more than 0.25 of every dollar voided, etc., from any cheque. Yous may have hundreds of team members working for your company that handle cash but past filtering the results there may only exist a handful that lucifer or exceed the criteria you lot established - now that's a lot more than manageable than trying to wait at every person.

Example

Voids Comps

Foreclose Employee Voids & Comps

As seen in the example higher up, once the filter is applied to the check particular, a listing of individuals who exceed this level (the exceptions) will exist produced. This limits the number of individuals that volition need farther review. To summarize, Exception-Based Reporting helps narrow your search which ways more than of your team'due south time is spent executing and less time is spent collecting and reviewing data.

What Exception-Based Reporting Users Say

Why are the exceptions so important?

"The exceptions could be something like a comp or a void, something that'due south been deleted. Information technology might be lots of dollars on the tabular array that we wouldn't take hold of. Today we've written alerts that show things like people with more than 5 comps in one day or more than than a sure dollar threshold. We use reddish, yellowish and green KPI indicators to make it stand out. You tin can't do that in about computer systems, but you tin can with an exception or an alert of some sort. It's like an alarm clock for your information, for the important stuff."

How has catching these exceptions impacted your visitor?

"The loss prevention side of our business has dropped a whole lot. Information technology's a lot easier to catch employees when they steal. The word gets out when someone gets caught and the other employees realize they shouldn't practice it. It keeps the honest people honest. Over time we've lowered our comps and deletes past over 2 percent points of our P&L, especially in the get-go 2 years. At that time it was probably $100,000/year that we were communicable and lowering in comps. An ROI of 10 times what we were spending on Mirus." - Business concern Analyst, Tumbleweed Tex Mex Grill

Conclusion

While information technology's not realistic to call up you can prevent all theft in every location, it is realistic to think you can minimize this action by actively monitoring bank check level particular. You tin first past monitoring discounts, voids, over-rings, and any other means your POS arrangement allows money to be removed from a bank check.

Next, setting a threshold for what's adequate (anybody makes a fault and needs to brand a correction on a check) or reasonable will permit you to focus on cashiers and managers exhibiting beliefs that's inconsistent with the threshold y'all've set. In the outset, you should keep an eye and make sure the threshold is doing a reasonable job and conform as necessary.

Over time, you'd want to try and lower it – again keeping an heart to make sure you're not flagging everyone. The goal here is to slowly tighten up the level of acceptability to further minimize theft. In summary, capturing your cheque level item in a comprehensive, exception-based reporting and analytic solution like Mirus will transform your data into a powerful tool to aid you combat many of the means cash theft can occur.

Are you able to easily and quickly identify the potential theft issues in your restaurants?

About Mirus:

Mirus provides services in data management and solutions in custom reporting for the eating house industry.

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Trust Your Data Not Your Gut Feeling

Topics: Eatery Loss Management