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Touch Screen Cash Registers Are Catching Employee Thieves In Their Digital Tracks
If you're running a retail business, you will inevitably have to deal with employees with sticky fingers. Fortunately, digital touch screen cash register systems improve visibility and traceability.
Unfortunately, ingenious thieves always find a new way to beat the system. But with the help of video surveillance and biometrics, the touch screen POS system can track the digital trail of dishonest employees.
The Discount Happy Employee
Touch screen POS monitors improve visibility. Together with video surveillance and POS reports, here are examples of what your digital sleuthing could capture. If your employee:has a high number of refunds, but the video shows no customer at the cash register when refunds are processed or if they use a high number of employee discounts and the same relative of the employee is at the counter each time the discount is processed; you have caught your thief red handed.
The Slippery Handed Supervisor
The digitized retail business assigns each cashier their own ID and PIN card. This way, if an employee has an unusually high number of voids, No Sale items, or returned items, a red flag is raised. A wayward supervisor, however, could be slipping into all the tills when he or she is called over to do a void or customer return. If the supervisor is at the cash register each time a suspicious transaction is identified by POS reports and is caught on video entering other employee IDs on the touch screen, you have your culprit.
The Biometric Face
Touch screen cash registers are introducing many innovations. Notably, they are making biometric transaction tracking possible. Biometrics put a face to employee theft in your business. Both the customer and employee will be captured by the touch screen cash register in the future retail store.
If your cunning cashier tries to enter fake voids, they will be stopped in their digital tracks. Pay-with-your-face could require facial recognition to process both the original sale and void. In other words, every transaction, void, discount, and so on would leave a digital facial print.
An investment in touch screen cashier technology is a small price to pay when you tally the high costs of internal theft. The indirect costs of employee theft can be more costly to your business than the costs of direct theft. For 21 major retailers surveyed in 2019, the direct losses equaled $45 million, or $1,380 per dishonest employee. Employees pocketed 11 percent more than in 2018. Like many businesses, you could recover losses from theft by raising prices, but then you risk losing customers to competitors.