Shrinkage is not just the customer stealing!

A lot of business owners don't realise that the majority of stock loss within the business is not due to customers at all, but their own staff. This is not to say that staff are thieving goods knowingly, and management is usually as much to blame. It comes down to procedures.

What are staff entitlements within your business? Let's take for example, a café/bar business that allows staff to have a bottle of soft drink each shift. An average week will see eleven staff members working a combined total of five shifts/day and you are open every day of the week:

35 shifts/week = 35 soft drinks unaccounted for. Cost price 1 x soft drink = $1.85.

35 x $1.85 = $64.75/week or $3,367/year!

Can your business afford to have that kind of money just being lost to the wind?

Unaccounted stock is just one area your business could be losing money. Another is stock that needs to be written off because it was dropped, has gone off, made by mistake or returned by the customer. All of this stock must be accounted for, otherwise you don't know where your money is going.

Thankfully, Idealpos has features in place to help you record just these sort of situations. Put procedures in place to ensure you minimise your shrinkage risk:

1. Give staff members a customer account. Allow them to have a discount on items and they pay it once a week. Staff cannot charge items to their own account. Managers also have an account.
2. If you allow items given to staff for free, still record them all, but use Waste Mode to write the stock off.
3. Perform mini stocktakes on random items each week to assess different areas you could be losing money.
4. Involve the staff in the stock control procedures so they can see how to improve it, and the figures involved. The more money saved, the more can be used to improve their conditions.
5. Use the latest technology. Idealpos' Stock Manage app allows you to always be on top of your stock levels.

Find the holes and plug them up.