Missing money?? Ever consider employee theft to be the reason??

I hope the answer is “yes”.  Statistically, employee theft, also known as internal theft, is the highest causal factor for loss in retail.  I know we all like to believe that cash losses are just “mistakes” and that we can do some re-training to fix the problem.  You may be right.  Some cash loss is due to mistakes being made.  Unfortunately, it can often be due to internal theft.  So how do you know the difference?  Easy, you have to conduct an employee theft investigation every time you have a cash loss to find out what the cause is.

Employee theft investigations can be simple or complex.  It really just depends on the situation.  For cash, you should start your employee theft investigation by creating an Over/Short tracker.  One way to do this is create a spreadsheet with all of the employees who run a register listed on the left hand column going vertically across the page.  Then you make a row of dates horizontally across the top.  Every time you have a shortage, go ahead and make a mark by each cashier on the till under the date the shortage occurred.  If you do have a thief, you will start to see a pattern develop over time as you will only have one common denominator on the tills.

Another way to complete and employee theft investigation on cash is to do a careful review of the journal roll for that register.  You are looking for a few things.

1) You are looking for a mistake that may show that it was an error and not theft.

2) You are looking for high employee theft indicators such as: No Sales, Refunds, Voids, etc.

You should then use your camera system to “spot check” a few suspicious transactions to see if that is where the money went missing.

Internal theft investigations on cash often take time and patience, but it’s well worth the investment if it means removing a dishonest employee.

For more information on employee theft, internal theft or employee theft investigation contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia