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
