'Twas the night before Monday

'Twas the night before Monday, and all through the stores

Not a register was ringing, no popping of drawers;

The carts were all lined by the door with great care,

In hopes that bargain shoppers soon would be there;

The cameras were pointed; all focused on doors,

While visions of emptiness danced on the floors;

And money all locked in the drop safe with care,

the tills were all balanced for tomorrow’s affair,

When out in the parking lot there arose such a clatter,

The cameras zoom in to see what was the matter.

A line started forming; a mob like a flash,

With unwanted presents and gift receipts stashed.

Those wanting to be first to get money back

Lined up outside, prepared to attack,

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a known refunder with all of his gear,

He had fake gift receipts and bad ids totaling six,

I knew in a moment, it was something I’d fix.

More rapid than ever, I hit PTZ

And he produced from his bag stolen goods; received free!

"Now, Cameras! Now, Aspect! Now, all our Cashiers!

Now is the time to kick into gear!


To the start of the transaction! Zoom into the man!

Now let’s catch him and his cohorts, and foil their plan!"

End this crime spree by checking data twice,

This is a guy who’s surely not nice

Help other retailers and build up the case,

Prevent other thieves from getting a taste,

Of relaxed refund standards and merchandise stolen.

By employees and thieves, hoping it’s golden.

So I use my reporting, and many cases I find,

Refunds and discounts, cashiers stealing us blind.

Aspect EliteLP helps save the day,

Employees think twice and thieves stay away;

The refund is fake, the SVC later voided,

No success for the refunder.

Perhaps future thefts avoided!

We all celebrate our success with cheer.

                              And are very happy to have Aspect EliteLP here.

Ringing Up Refunds

Holiday Refund Fraud

After many weeks spent wondering about the perfect gifts to purchase, we can see that there is an end in sight. All of the hustle and bustle will be wrapping up, only to be replaced by large crowds of people rushing to the stores Monday morning in hopes of great sales and to make those holiday returns and exchanges.

Of course the biggest issue retailers will face will be fraudulent refunds of merchandise that has been stolen and returned for cash or merchandise credit.  Now that you have prepared and set up for the onset of all the holiday refunds, it is time to make sure you are staying on top of all of your exception reporting in an effort to identify fraudulent refund activity. All of these practices are proving to be a challenge to Loss Prevention departments as retailers are adjusting refund policies in an effort to do as much as possible to build consumer confidence and loyalty.  Using the base Aspect reports and ad hocs built specifically for your needs, you will be able to find the exceptions more rapidly and minimize the impact to your profits. 

No Receipt Cash Refunds – Run the Cash Refund Summary with a sub report looking for the “No Receipt Indicator” to be flagged (usually 1 or Y) and a transaction amount that is consistent with your average refund amount.  Look for those associates within a store that have   a much larger number of these high risk refunds than their peers.  Don’t forget that  a Merchandise Credit or Gift Card is often just as good as cash, use the Refund Transaction Summary and look for instances where a Merchandise Credit is issued. 

Same Day Refunds – There has been a huge increase in the number of “same day refund” cases reported by Aspect users.  After Christmas, few customers come into the store to buy merchandise and then immediately return it, so this will be a great time to check out this sub report (if you have a “Refund Days” option), or look at the detail in an transaction level ad hoc report.  Associates often use the “Receipt Reprint” function to validate the refund, so look for these indicators as well.   

Multiple Refunds Same Original – If your company doesn't use a refund authorization program, internal and external theft is often found with this report.  Always look for original receipts that are used on multiple refund transactions AND the variance is large.  If your company is systematically protected from this scam, look for a variance of “$0” which may indicate that an associate is cashing out a partially used receipt.   

Single Item Cash Refunds/Single Item Refunds – Many retailers have reported that a large percentage of their fraudulent refunds contain only one item.  This behavior could suggest that the dishonest associate may have a specific SKU memorized or at their disposal and/or they ar e comfortable with a specific price point.  If this is the case in your company, these reports can help you identify the associates with counts exceptionally higher than their peers.  Use a sub report to identify your average refund amount OR to identify refunds just below a requirement for manager authorization look for Cash or Merchandise Credit tenders.   

We hope you enjoy your holidays! Safe travels to those who will be visiting others.

 I know I have some members of our family wishing for snow but I hope for no delays in your plans.

Enjoy the time with family and friends.

Happy New Year in 2012!!!!

Prepping for Refunds and Exchanges

After the rush of the holidays and the gifts have been opened and unwrapped, the season of refunds and exchanges begins.  While the sweater given to me by Aunt Mabel would work great for next year’s ugly sweater party, I have a feeling that a trip to the store to return some unwanted gifts will be sure to occur.

Prepare for the Rush: This is the time of the year when most retailers see a spike in the average number of refunds processed.  While many of these are legitimate, those that are seeking to defraud the company will also use this time to their advantage. There are several ways to prepare you ahead of time for this busy return season.  The first is to make sure that you have updated your registers and have set up any refund specific registers in your Aspect EliteLP system.  This will help in your analysis of transactions to these refund-only registers so that they can be looked at with different thresholds.

Know the Policy: This is also a good time to make sure that your associates are aware of the correct policies for refunds.  These are important reminders not only about the policy for external customers but also can help remind employees about the policy on employee refunds.  You will want to be aware of employee refunds to make sure that the employee discounts are being applied and taken into account as needed.  Employees can see refunds as a way to return merchandise purchased with their employee discount and receive more than they paid for the item when it is returned. 

Be on the Look Out: Another simple tip for the busy return season is to make sure that your receipt tape is kept locked up and out of sight.  Many organized retail crime groups will see unlocked receipt tape as an open invitation to make their own fraudulent receipts from the comfort of their own home. Also, remind your associates to look inside returned packages.  An article from Stores.Org, (Click here to read) highlighted some of the items that have been found inside packages returned after the customer has received their refund. 

Adjust: You may also want to adjust your thresholds so that you make sure you aren’t overwhelmed with AutoMIND alerts that are triggered simply due to the higher volume.  Make a plan to adjust refund thresholds as the business picks up. 

Refund fraud is expected to cost retailers over $3.5 billion this holiday season alone according to an article by NRF (Click here to read).  In our next blog we will look at some Aspect EliteLP tips for analyzing the refund transactions as they begin to enter your system.  I hope that you have found these holiday tips to be helpful over the past few weeks.  We plan to continue with our weekly blog so please make sure to email and let us know which areas you would like to see discussed.

Please enjoy the upcoming Holidays. Here’s to hoping that those “Oh you really shouldn’t have” gifts come with gift receipts to make your holiday return season even easier!

Employees “Taking” Credit:

A few years ago, while going to make some last minute holiday purchases, my mom was rather surprised to find out that her credit card had hit its max.  While she remembered doing a bit more shopping than she had planned, she knew there was no way that there were that many extra gifts waiting for us under the tree.  After several phones calls, she was able to find out that her credit card number had been taken from one of the business she had shopped at and that several new electronics had been purchased and were set to be delivered to our home.  These thieves had not only stole her credit card information but knew our address and the police were able to determine that the thieves  were tracking the package delivery so that they would swoop in and pick it up when it arrived before my mom knew a thing.  It is situations like this that make retailers aware that employees are finding new ways each day to steal, not only from you their employers, but from the customers that you try so hard to please.

There are many ways that credit card fraud can cause loss..  One of the most popular reports with Aspect EliteLP users is the “Credit/ Debit Refunds Over Purchases” report.  With this report you will want to watch for repeat account numbers  to identify those customers who have received more credit to their credit cards than they have actually spent.  These customers may have purchased one item and received a receipt that they have duplicated and then stole more merchandise to continue to return fraudulently.  You can use a sub-report with the completion codes and transaction codes for employee transactions as well and this will identify employee activity on an account with more refunds than purchases. I will post some tips on creating these sub-reports on our LinkedIn page.

Another popular report with our users is the “Multiple Refunds, Same Account, Same Associate” report.  Many times associates still do not want to risk stealing cash but instead easily credit their own accounts with what they believe is little risk of being caught.  The associate could be processing their own refunds for merchandise that was not purchased as a way of stealing money or lowering their own account balances.Look at these credit transactions to see if they have ever been associated with an employee purchase and you may be able to tie in some fraudulent employee purchases.  On the other hand,  they could be using a friend or family members’ card to credit.  In today’s tough economic times, your associates may be trying to help out their friends or family members.

With the increased popularity of purchasing gift cards and re-selling them online, you can also run reports looking at SVC purchased with credit cards.  If you are able to determine a credit card is fraudulent you may be able to cancel the gift card before it has been used to reduce your loss.

An employee may also try to ring fraudulent transactions by manually entering credit card numbers.  The “Credit Debit Account: Manual and Swiped” report will identify these transactions.  Pay close attention to transactions where the card is swiped and then later in the day is used in a transaction by manually being entered.  While this could indicate a mag-swipe that isn’t working correctly, it also could be an associate that retained an account number to ring up a fraudulent transaction.

Staying on top of your credit card transactions will not only help your bottom line, it will keep your customers happy in knowing that purchases they make in your store are safe.  Do not let your employees think that they can take “credit” when credit is not due.  Let Aspect EliteLP help to give the credit to you!

On the 6th tip from Aspect, our system gave to me…. 6 Discount Abusers

One perk of the job that I miss from time to time is the generous discount I received on my purchases while I was working for a retailer.  I was appreciative that I received this discount and made sure to follow all of the guidelines when making my purchases.  However, working in Loss Prevention I found that not everyone was as appreciative of this benefit and they were able to abuse the discount to be even more greedy.

There are several ways to use the Aspect EliteLP application to help you identify those employees that might be taking advantage of you.  You can run a basic report that will show you any time the employee ringing the purchase was also the employee making the purchase. These transactions are usually against company policy and should be reviewed to ensure they are valid transactions. Our friends at LP Innovations have also written some useful information about monitoring employee transactions.  Read more about it here: http://blog.lpinnovations.com/Loss-Prevention-Leadership/bid/42578/Employee-Discount-Abuse-Employee-Theft-or-Inadequate-Training

As I mentioned in this blog previously when talking about SVC’s or Gift Cards , it is often easier for employees to steal the cards than actual cash from the register.

 

We have already discussed employees taking advantage of left behind gift cards in our Gift Cards Galore blog  but employees have figured out even more ways to use SVC’s to their discount abusing advantage.  It is important to run reports that are looking at SVC’s Issued and Redeemed by the Same Person.  This will identify instances where the associate ringing the purchase or return later uses the SVC in an employee purchase.  If you see transaction where this is the case, it will be helpful to review both the issuing and redeeming transactions. Employees may be making fraudulent returns without receipts and then will use the SVC on their purchases later.  Employees also may be using SVC’s that were used in customer transactions but then were left behind.  Looking at Employee Purchases with SVC Redeemed queries and then checking SVC’s in which previous purchases were not employee purchases will help you to locate instances where this may be occurring. You can also find these transactions by looking at Multiple SVC Redemptions Same Account, Date. 

By running the Employee Merchandise Credit Transactions Report you can use this report to track employees using merchandise credits on employee discount purchases/refunds, especially if this is against corporate policy. Other problems revealed by this report might be use of the same merchandise credit account number against the same employee number, or merchandise credit refunds not involving employee discounts (employees ringing refunds without returning their discount.Employee Purchase with Repetitive Amounts is a great report to keep an eye on.  Use this report to investigate associates with frequent employee transactions rung for the same amounts. The report lists associates who have rung multiple employee purchases (or refunds) for the same amount. The report shows the associate, the amount of the repetitive transaction, and the count. Keep in mind that this report is by the associate who rang the sale, not the purchaser. You can track the purchasing employee with any of the Top Employee Purchases report. The Employee maybe purchasing a hot item for friend or reselling on eBay or Craig’s List for a profit.

Another useful report to run is Top Employee Purchases.  Sort this report by Discount Amount to see those employees which stand out above the norm.  Also, it may be helpful to identify employees that have not ever used their employee discount.  The holiday season is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this employee benefit and employees that are not making any purchases may be taking advantage of you in some other dishonest way. It is also something to watch when you see employees with low employee purchases but witness them wearing or using a lot of new company product.  These employees may be taking this merchandise if it does not seem to match up with the employee purchases you can track in Aspect.

Employees may also try to take advantage of store promotions and additional savings.  It is important to make sure that you are watching for stacked discounts in employee transactions.  These could be training issues if employees are unaware of store policies regarding employee discounts but many times these are ways they are trying to take advantage of what they perceive as loopholes.  This is also important when discussing the purchase of SVC cards.  You will want to ensure that employees know the policies regarding the use of their employee discounts to purchase and/or redeem SVC’s because this is the busiest time of the year for these transactions.

Hopefully following these steps will help you be able to pull back the reins on those employees that are trying to take your employee discounts for a ride this holiday season.

   

Discounts and Falling Prices Ahead

It is that time of the year when mailboxes are becoming more and more filled with coupons and discounts telling us that we are valued and are “friends” of a particular store.  I admit, it feels good to think that a store has noticed the large amount of money that I have spent during the past year and that they would like to reward me with a very special shopping event.  However, that feeling soon goes away when I walk into that store only to see piles of the “Friends and Family” coupons sitting on a table and the associates mentioning that everyone gets X% off their entire purchase.  While this might seem like a great deal and wonderful way to get customers into the store, this may actually be hurting your bottom line in a few different ways.

When sales like this occur, this is a good time to look at discounts and see if multiple discounts are being given on the same transaction.  Discount stacking can lead to losses for you and big deals for dishonest employees and customers.  Running queries on discounts can help indentify associates with discounts above the store/company average. You will want to keep your threshold high so that you do you become overloaded with small dollar/count transactions.

Change Up: Price changes are another area to look at for possibly fraud.  If you capture reason codes for price overrides, look for possible training issues or even issues with quality control if too many damage discounts are being given out. Running the Associate Ranking and looking at price overrides as a % of sales will identify the associates with the highest percentage of price overrides and allow you to look into the individual price overrides that were given. 

To the Extreme: The increased popularity of couponing both online and with shows like TLC’s Extreme Couponing, have led to another area of potential fraud and abuse. According to Stores.org, coupon fraud costs retailers $500 million per year.  Many times training employees on company policies regarding stacking coupons and price matching, can help your bottom line.  Teach employees to ask if they are unsure whether or not the coupon is for the item purchased and to make sure to look at expiration dates and limitations.  You may also want to identify employees with higher than average redemption of coupons.

Loyal Followers: If your store captures loyalty card information, it is also important to look at refunds in regards to loyalty purchases.  You will want to look to make sure that purchases used to gain the loyalty rewards are not being returned after the reward is received.  Employee use of loyalty cards should also be monitored to make sure that they are not scanning their own cards when a customer does not present their card.  In some instances a dishonest cashier may be accumulating reward points fraudulently and redeeming the rewards for purchases.  You will want to monitor any loyalty cards associated with an employee number.

In the next entry we will be looking at employee purchases and will discuss the use of coupons and promotions by employees as well.

So while I will still feel special finding my “friends and family” coupons in my mailbox, the rest of my satisfaction can lie in the fact that I am getting a discount that is not fraudulent and only required me to dive into my mailbox rather than a dumpster looking for a good deal.

Just another Aspect of my day,

Shannon

Gift Cards Galore

Growing up, when we received a gift in an envelope during the holidays, it was usually a nice crisp $5 or $10 bill from Great Grandma.  She wasn’t able to get out and shop easily and she also would have had no idea what to purchase for her young great grandchildren.  Had she been alive today, the envelopes she handed out would more than likely hold a gift card.   A recent NRF survey found that for the 5^th year in a row, gift cards remain the most requested holiday gift.  It is expected that American Consumers will spend $27.8 billion in total gift card spending in 2011. Click here to read more.  With this increased number, the fraud exposure will be sure to grow – both internally and externally. 

The theft and fraudulent use of Stored Value Cards or SVCs is another way that associates have found to try to take advantage of the system.  When analyzing your SVC data you may want to look at  few of our favorite reports from the SVC Incident Category:

ü  Merchandise Credit Issued and Redeemed Summary

ü  Multiple SVC Same Transaction

ü  SVC Issued and Redeemed by Same Person

ü  SVC Issued and Redeemed Same Day

The “SVC Issued and Redeemed on the Same Day” report is excellent for highlighting several high risk situations.  For example, we all know that the average shopper will not purchase a SVC card and then turn around and use it the same day.  If you see this happening it could be a situation where the associate selling the gift card keeps the live one and gives the customer a blank.  The “good” card is then used for another sale and the associate keeps the cash.  Also look for situations where the card is purchased on a regular sale and redeemed as an Employee Sale.  This is a great indicator of employee discount fraud.  Finally, watch for SVCs that are issued in a regular refund and redeemed on an Employee Sale – especially if the same person uses it. These scenarios are quickly identified by using filters. More detailed steps on creating this will be posted on our LinkedIn page.  

It amazes me that some associates are so greedy that they want their employee discount even when they are paying for the merchandise with a fraudulently created or stolen gift card.  But then again, if they were smart, they wouldn’t steal.  Using the “SVC Issued and Redeemed By the Same Person” report will identify situations where the selling associate is the same as the person who redeems the card on an Employee Sale.  There are few situations where this is a legitimate transaction, so hits on this report are a great indicator of theft. 

 Many retailers have reported situations where the associate keeps SVCs with small balances, telling the customer that they have been used up.  These cards accumulate and are then used on their own transactions later (remember the greedy factor??).  Look  at the “Multiple SVC in Same Transaction” report with a sub report for Employee Purchases – when you see lots of small value ones, there may be a problem!

This is also the season where many companies issue promotional gift cards when a customer achieves a given sales threshold or for other things like being one of the first hundred people on a given day.  This type of promotion is great for driving business but is a tempting target for associates.  Watch for these cards showing up on employee purchases or for an associate who is either issuing or redeeming a card on every transaction.  It could be an integrity issue or a training issue – it is probably something that should be checked out.

External theft also occurs with SVC’s.  Review the “SVC Issued by Tender” report and really focus on large gift card sales that were purchased with acheck or a fraudulent credit card.  Many of these fraudsters are putting these cards out to auction so by checking the validity of the purchasing account, you can decommission cards that were purchased with bad  credit cards or checks.  Aspect retailers have reported six figure savings by using this process!

Another external fraud issue is the cloning of cards in the stores.  Be sure that stores know to contact Loss Prevention if there is a sudden disappearance of blank gift cards in the store.  That way you can be alert to possible upcoming fraudulent activity.

  There are many ways that employee and dishonest customers can be committing gift card fraud.  LP Innovations has published an article with even more ways that you may want to protect yourself this Holiday season.  You can view this article at this link http://www.lpinnovations.com/page/86-gift_card_fraud/.

Along with these tips, it helps to make sure that gift cards are being disposed of properly and that you have a specific policy for dealing with cards left behind by customers.  While some associates may want these excess cards to make wonderful items like gift card rugs, others may see this as a green light to take their own little holiday gift from you. 

 

  Just another Aspect of my day,

Shannon

Leftovers

I hope this post finds you stuffed from the amazing food over the holiday weekend and that your employees were not leaving your store with their pockets stuffed with your hard earned profits.  After eating more than enough on Thanksgiving, I found myself leaving my parent’s home with containers filled with leftovers.  My mom definitely gave me the “hook up” and I should be stocked up for at least a few more days.  So how am I going to tie leftover food into loss prevention you may wonder?  I want to take a look at register leftovers: line voids, post voids and layaways.  Get it? Left behind, leftovers, yep I can be creative occasionally.

Line them up: Some of my favorite transactions to look at when I am doing analysis are those with line item voids. There seems to be no shortage of associates looking to help their friends out with holiday shopping by giving them the “hook up”.  Catching someone in the act of sweet-hearting or passing items is often tough and with so many companies using video at the registers, the bad associates try to make everything look right to the eye in the sky.  Line voids is a great way for them to do this since it looks like things are being rung up and a manager doesn’t have to be called over.  I find it interesting that these employees expect us to believe that during the busy holiday season someone would actually wait in line with a cart full of items, then decide that they just want to the 99 cent pair of socks, and it’s perfectly legitimate that they  have to line void out the remaining 20 items. 

(Then again, maybe this is a new trend I haven’t picked up on yet; I still don’t understand that whole planking thing). 

 So, catch these people “hooking up” their friends by looking for transactions where the number and dollar amounts of the voided items are really high and the transaction total is really small.    Look for associates with more of these high risk transactions or just link to the video of the transaction to find out what really happened. 

Time to check them out: Also, if you have duration as a data element, you might want to look at transactions with long durations but small item counts or transaction amounts.  The Generic Transaction Summary can help highlight these cases where the associate is pretending to ring up the items for the sake of the camera or other people around. I would definitely be wondering what kind of extreme couponing was going on to get a whole cart load of items for $4.99!

Press Pause: When looking at post voids, it is often helpful to look at reports that will show Post Voids that occurred more than “X” transactions after the sale or Post Voids more than “X” minutes after the sale.  Look for associates that have a high percentage of post voids of cash sales.  A lot of customers will be asking for gift receipts and dishonest associates will often use this as an opportunity to use these for post voids.  One way to track this is by looking for associates with more applied voids where cash was tendered and be suspicious if they do not have a corresponding number of applied voids with other tenders.  You can also track which associate is issuing more reprint or gift receipts than their peers.

Transaction voids are another area of concern to watch for.  These are typically transactions in which the associate will void the entire transaction prior to its completion.  In some cases this can be done when the associate sees that the customer is paying with cash.  For example, if they know the total will be $100.50, they can void the transaction, take the money and their register will actually be over fifty cents after they are able to take the $100 in cash for themselves.

Suspended transactions are also of interest if associates can suspend a sale.  This is often done after their friend has already left with the merchandise.  You will want to look for a large number of suspends, especially if there is not a corresponding number of resumed transactions. Transaction cancels can also be done to give the appearance that merchandise has been rung and passed off to someone or to allow the associate to pocket the incoming payment for the purchase.  

Laying in Wait: After slowly being phased out of most retailers, today’s economy has greatly increased the number of stores offering the option to Layaway merchandise – especially during the holidays.  This is another area where employees can take advantage of you.  If your store has layaways it may be helpful to focus on layaways where the majority of the total merchandise value is deleted and a low-dollar final payment is made. Look at Layaway Item Deletes/Partial Cancels that are not followed by a final payment or sale of those deleted items. Focus on cashiers that have a high number of Fee Refunds based on the policies of the store.  Also, if it is your store’s policy, monitor whether or not promotional items have been placed on layaway. While this may not be a theft issue, it could be a training issue that could cost the company those important margin dollars.

So with the official kick off of the Holiday season underway, the pressure we all feel during the next month intensifies.  Again, we are hoping that these tips can ease some of that pressure by helping you prevent some of your associates from using their position to increase their popularity among friends in need of holiday shopping discounts.  Maybe these friends will give them the hook up when they are in need of a new job!

 In our next entry, we will take a look at some tips on monitoring SVC’s.  The use of Gift Cards has been increasing each year and this year looks to be no different.

Another Aspect of my day,

Shannon

Cheers to Good food, Great Football and a Dishonesty-free Black Friday: Prepping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

One of my lasting Thanksgiving memories is that after our big family meal, someone would pull out the super sized edition of the newspaper to look at Black Friday ads.  We would sit and listen to the adults plan out their shopping attack and I would initial as many items as I could, hoping of course that my mom did not get trampled but still envisioning her sparing no one in her attempts to buy me the wonderful toys I picked out.   Wake up times were set in advance and the shopping trip to the Twin Cities began in the wee hours of the morning in hopes of completing as much shopping as possible without the children along. 

Now that I am on the other end of the retail spectrum, I see the Black Friday planning from an entirely different view. I still apply my Mother’s Black Friday theory “planning makes the process much more successful” but now instead of spending money, I work on saving money (for the company).  So, here are some To Do’s for your Aspect EliteLP application that can help you be successful.

Tip 1:  Midnight Mania and Your Store Hours: As I mentioned in my last entry, we all know that the consuming of turkey might be a little rushed this year for those wanting to get in line for stores to open with the Midnight openings scheduled for many retailers.  It is important to know that the Aspect business day is based upon the calendar date of the transaction – transactions that occur before midnight will be counted with the previous day’s business.  Also,  make sure your Aspect Administrator makes the temporary change to the Store Open/Close file before the sales date so that your “Before Open” and “After Close” indicators work correctly.    

Tip 2:  Update, Update, Update: The System Administrator should complete Region/District and Register/Associate updates so that all transactions will be immediately available.  Additionally, any Associate Groups or Store Groups from master that you have created should be refreshed.  There are often a lot of changes prior to the holiday season.  It is best to update now rather than when the rush of next week hits!

Tip 3: Prepare your Black Friday Alerts:  Are there any alerts regarding Black Friday business that you want to receive promptly on Saturday?  If so, create and schedule the appropriate AutoMIND rules.  Also, the larger than normal sales from Friday will often take longer to run.  Check with your IT administrator to make sure that the AutoMIND processes are scheduled to run after the load finishes.  You may want to also increase your use of reports that capture web purchases or returns with Cyber Monday right around the corner.

Tip 4: Door-Busting Deals and SKU Tracking:  Even employees want to get some shopping done on Black Friday.  By having your Aspect Administrator populate the Special SKU table with some specific SKUs you are most interested in you will be able to monitor employee purchases of these items and also look for door-buster items that were purchased later in the day.  This may be a good sign that some hoarding and hiding of items was taking place.  You can also monitor these items for sales/compliance/etc.  Reports can help you see if high profile items were sold or returned prior to Black Friday and can also show you sales of an item by the hour.  This is another great way to work together with the entire store in using the Aspect EliteLP application to report Black Friday information.

Tip 5: Promotional Gift Cards and Special Pricing Promotions: Is your Company giving out free gift cards (i.e. running promotions where you buy $X and get a Gift Card)?  Create queries to identify situations where they are not issued correctly or other high risk usage such as being redeemed in an Employee Sale. Think now about what other queries will be needed to check for compliance or to provide operational support.  This is yet another great opportunity to partner with Marketing or Operations. For additional tips on gift card promotions, check out this article: http://blog.lpinnovations.com/Loss-Prevention-Leadership/bid/65835/Gift-Card-Discounting-Through-the-Holidays-and-Beyond

Taking a few proactive steps like these before holiday season hits will make you much more confident that you are entering the season steps ahead of those looking to steal their way to a happy holiday.

So, let the Aspect EliteLP application help you in the Black Friday process, just like my husband will be helping me with my Black Friday process when I drop him outside of a store to wait in line at midnight. 

For my next entry we will be talking about those wonderful Thanksgiving leftovers---Voids, Suspend/Resumed Transactions, and Layaways.  As always, please feel free to call Aspect Loss Prevention direct @ 1.888.777.0587 if you have any questions or need assistance.

Just another Aspect of my day,

Shannon