| Thursday, December 26, 2024 | CONTACT |
Add $1,000 or More to Your Business's bottom Line in 30 Days!
Your money is in the trash
If you really want to gain a good sense of what's happening to your product, you need to look at what's in your trashcans. I know that no one relishes the thought of digging through the garbage, but if I told you could find $10 bills in your trashcans every day, I bet you would be going through their contents. The fact is, there probably are $10 bills (in the form of product) in your trash on a daily basis.
When I was a store manager working for a large, national restaurant chain, my district manger would paw through my trashcans every time he visited my store. He would dig through the trash in my food prep area, revealing product that could have been used, but that had been thrown away instead. He would make my dishwasher hold his trash can up on the edge of the dumpster, while he raked out the contents into the dumpster, often revealing silverware, sauce cups, and other kitchen tools.
Raking trash out of the can and into the dumpster is a practice you should employ at sporadic intervals. Not only might you find where those lost small wares are going, but it might also reveal product that is being smuggled out. At very least, it will make those employees who are thinking about using the trash as vehicle to get merchandise out of your store, a bit leery about doing that.
While you would be wise to inspect the contents of all your trashcans periodically, when you are first getting started with your efforts to curb unnecessary waste, there is an easier, cleaner way of seeing what's going on. Implement the use of some waste buckets for a couple of weeks.
Get some 3 or 5-gallon plastic buckets, and write wet on one, and dry on the other. Put a pair of buckets in the barista's area (where your customers can't see them), and a pair back where your food prep is done. Next, make a mandate to your employees that no food product is to go into the trashcans until further notice. Instead, put any waste in the buckets!
The brewed coffee that should be dumped when the timer goes off, the pitcher of scalded milk, the extra dink made in error, pour them into the wet bucket. The burnt panini, 2-day old pastries, crushed piece of cheesecake, cores of romaine left after processing, put them into the dry bucket. Now, every time an employee is ending their shift, check their waste buckets. You'll be able to quickly assess what is being wasted, how much, and if there seems to be a connection between the employees working and the amount of waste produced.
Now, a word of caution; don't scream at your employees if they seem to produce an excessive amount of waste! If you get upset with them, they are going to be reluctant to put things in the buckets. You need to see what's going on, the good, the bad, and yes, especially the shocking! This process gives you an opportunity to see where your money is going, and also provides you with the opportunity to work with your employees to minimize waste. When excessive waste is encountered, ask your employees why they believe this happened, and what thoughts they might have about how to eliminate or reduce it. You want to get them involved in the solution.
Theft of money
Hopefully, none of your employees will have the desire to steal products from you, but some will be tempted by the lure of cold, hard, cash. Everyone could use an extra $20 a day. Employees who steal money from you will definitely hurt your bottom line, and must be eliminated.
The first way to reduce cash theft is to have a cash handling policy in place that will discourage theft. If multiple employees are using the cash register, and no one person is responsible, then I can almost guarantee that your cash drawer will keep coming up short; on a regular basis. The fact that no one person can be held responsible for the shortages, will make grabbing a bill or two easy and appealing.
Implement a policy that one, and only one person is responsible for the cash register for the entire shift. They should count the drawer at the beginning of their shift to verify that they are starting with the designated change bank. Then, they should be the only person to ring up sales and make change. Finally, at the end of their shift, they should set aside the amount they started with in the change drawer, and total all the remaining cash, checks, and charges, and balance against what was rung up on their shift. If they started with the right amount of money in the cash drawer, rang everything up, took all the money, counted back all the change, and they end up short... who's fault is it? It can only be theirs. By implementing this simple policy, I once took an operation that was coming up $100 a day ($3,000 a month) cash short, and reduced it to $3 a day, in just 30 days! (That's over a $2,900 bottom line improvement, in case you didn't do the math!)
The other common method that a cashier might use to steal money from you is by using a method called, building a bank. This is the process of not ringing up items on the cash register, while still taking money from the customers, and then pocketing that money. Typically, they will obscure the view of the cash register display on the customer's side with something like a flower, retail merchandise, or by turning the display so that it cannot be easily seen. Then, they will pretend to ring up an item, but will hit the no sale key instead, popping the drawer open so they can take the cash and make change, but in reality, they haven't rung up anything. The other thing they might do when it is busy is to just not shut the drawer between transactions. They simply convey verbally the cost of items ordered by customers and take the cash.
The financial impact of this type of activity can be extremely damaging, for example: Let's say you have a cashier who is skimming off $20 a day by not ringing things up, and then pocketing the money. Not only did you loose the stolen $20, but the $7 of ingredients that were used to produce the ordered products; ($20 x 35% ingredient cost = $7.00). So in reality, you lost $27, and it will take an additional $41.54 in sales, to recover this loss; ($41.54 x 65% gross profit = $27). $27 a day lost to theft, X 21 days worked by the employee = $567 lost cash & product per month; $872 extra sales required to offset this loss. (Annual loss, $6,804; $10,468 in additional income required to offset loss.) You must stop theft of money!
If you observe that the cash register's display has been blocked from the customer's view, or there are an excessive number of no sale indications on your cash register's detail tape, or notice that your cashier is not shutting the drawer between transactions, beware! While this may not be indisputable proof that your cashier is stealing from you, it should certainly heighten your vigilance to find out if something is going on.
If you have a manger running your operation for you, this can really create an opportunity for cash theft. Just about anyone who has ever run a foodservice operation (self included), probably felt that they were over worked and under paid. Some are tempted to grant themselves an unapproved raise. Your manger has the control key to the cash register, which means they have the ability to back off items that were sold. You would be wise to check your cash register detail tapes on a regular basis. If you see multiple items backed off in groups, or more worrisome yet, all backed off at the very end of the shift, beware!
A good way to keep this from happening is to establish a policy that no over rings are to be backed off of sales on the cash register with the control key. Instead, when the cashier makes an over ring, they should take the receipt, write over ring on it, sign it, and put it in the cash drawer. At the end of the shift, the total of all over rings should be manually backed off of the sales total indicated on the cash register report.